Astrachat

Astrachat is an implementation of a real-time messaging service that makes use of IPFS and OrbitDB to achieve a community driven, decentralized way of sending messages between users. Making use of this module, users can create their own group chats and chat spaces.

Given that this node is completely community driven and decentralized, users support their own chat spaces by becoming a collaborative node. This way, the community can help make their chats persistent and fully reachable.

Note that this project is meant as a library to be used by any frontend that supports it. It's meant to run on both Node.js and a browser environment. As an example, bitxenia's astrawiki-web browser frontend includes chat support within articles, using this library.

Install

npm install @bitxenia/astrachat

Features

• Chat with other peers without relying on a centralized organization.
• Make your own community chat space to group all the relevant chats to your community, similar to a Discord server.
• Support the community of your choosing by becoming a collaborator. See Collaborating for more.

Usage

To create a node instance, use the createAstrachat function:

import { createAstrachat } from "@bitxenia/astrachat";

const node = await createAstrachat({
  chatSpace: "bitxenia-chat",
});

const chatList = await node.getChatList();
console.log(chatList);

The chat space name determines where the node places the chats. Creating a new chat using this node, for example, results in a new chat in the bitxenia-chat chat space.

To create a new chat, simply specify a name for it. Additionally, Astrachat supports callback functions to handle frontend events whenever the user receives a new message.

const callback = (message: ChatMessage) => console.log("New: ", message);
await node.createChat("Example chat", onNewMessage: callback);

Now that you've created a chat, you can start sending messages to it. Note that the chat'll only persist in the database after you send your first message. To do that, choose an alias to identify yourself as, and type something.

const text = "Hi from bitxenia :)";
await node.sendMessage("Example chat", text, "Bob");

If you want to connect to a chat that's already made, you can get all its messages with the node:

const messages = await node.getMessages("Example chat");
console.log("Messages", messages);

You can also add a callback function when connecting to an existing chat, so that you can stay up to date with the latest messages sent.

const callback = (message: ChatMessage) => console.log("New: ", message);
const messages = await node.getMessages("Example chat", onNewMessage: callback);

A chat space can contain multiple chats. Astrachat allows the user to list all of them.

const chatList = await node.getChatList();
console.log("All chats: ", messages);

Collaborating

To collaborate on your community's chat space, simply set isCollaborator to true in the createAstrachat arguments. This'll pin all the chats so other users can reach it through your node. This'll help in keeping the chats persistent, and increasing the availability within the IPFS network.

import { createAstrachat } from "@bitxenia/astrachat";

const node = await createAstrachat({
  chatSpace: "bitxenia-chat",
  isCollaborator: true,
});

Documentation

Development

Clone and install dependencies:

git clone [email protected]:bitxenia/astrachat.git
cd astrachat
npm install

Run Tests

npm run test

Build

npm run build

Run multiple nodes in a machine

To be able to run Astrachat in more than one instance per machine, you'll need to change the ports of the instances to be unique. Also, the datastore, blockstore, and data directories'll also need to be unique to the instance.

const datastore = new FsDatastore("./data/node1/datastore");
const blockstore = new FsBlockstore("./data/node1/blockstore");
return await createAstrachat({
  isCollaborator: true,
  datastore,
  blockstore,
  tcpPort: 51001,
  webrtcDirectPort: 51001,
  dataDir: "./data/node1",
});

Contributions

Contributions are welcome, please check the issues to get started.

Troubleshooting

The node can't receive incoming connections and thus can't collaborate

If the node is set to collaborate and it fails to do so, the reason should most likely be a port issue. The LibP2P implementation uses UPnP to automatically open ports and detect the public IP. If the modem is outdated, you'll need to manually open the ports and specify the public IP when creating the node in the createAstrachat function.

The ports that need to be opened manually are:

• 50001 TCP port, used to receive TCP incoming connections.
• 50001 UDP port, used to receive WebRTC-Direct incoming connections.

If this doesn't work, your ISP may be using Double NAT, which prevents incoming connections. In this case, you may need to contact your ISP to request a solution.

Other implementations

• https://github.com/bitxenia/astrachat-eth

License

MIT (LICENSE-MIT / http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)