Django Real-Time Chat API

Description

A high-performance, secure, and scalable real-time chat API built with Django. This API allows developers to easily build chat applications that can handle large amounts of messages and users.

Key Features (Completed)

• ✔ Real-time chat communication using WebSockets
• ✔ User authentication and authorization using token-based authentication
• ✔ Scalable architecture to handle large numbers of users and messages
• ✔ Efficient database design to store and retrieve messages in real-time
• ✔ Robust security features to protect against malicious attacks

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• Pip (Usually comes with official python installation)

Installing

1. Clone the repository:

https://github.com/brianobot/Chat.git

2. Setup Virtual Environment:

pip install pipenv
pipenv shell

3. Install the required packages:

pipenv install -r requirements.txt

4. Run the development server:

python manage.py runserver

API Endpoints:

The API has the following endpoints for authentication, messages, and chat rooms:

• /api/v1/api-token-auth/: Endpoint for obtaining tokens
• /api/v1/signup/ : Endpoint for Creating a user instance in the system
• /api/v1/login/ : Endpoint for Authenicating a user, returns auth token
• /api/v1/users/ : List all the user currently registered on the system
• /api/v1/chats/ : Lists All Chatroom that involves the current auth user
• /api/v1/chat/<str:room_id>/ : Returns a list of chats connected to the specified ChatRoom
  • Websocket connection is expected from the frontend at this endpoint for real time peer to peer messaging
• api/v1/messages/<int:message_id>/update/ : EndPoint for updating the read receipt of a message (specified by the message_id)

Object Concepts:

All chat-message instances are part of a chat-room instance which contains at least two users.

A user can see all chat-room that he is involved in by going the chat endpoint.
View URL - api/v1/chat/
A user can go into and interact with a chat-room by going to the chat-room endpoint View URL - api/v1/chat/<chat-room-id>/

Once in the chat-room view, a websocket is created for real-time connection with the server and hence the other connected user.
Websocket url - ws/chat/<chat-room-id>/

Maintainer:

• Brian Obot brianobot9@gmail.com