BareChat CLI

Anonymous chat anywhere with commandline

|project |version | |--------|--------| | terminal (this) | | | web | |

Features

• IRC like anonymous chat, fully p2p, no server required
• Minimalist, single command to start
• Can public a topic with hashcode, anyone with that hashcode can join the chat, even when the origin hoster left
• With commandline UI, flexible to extend with other UI

Prerequisite

Need bare runtime installed through npm. Could install globally using:

npm i -g bare

Normal Usage with commandline

Could install with command npm i -g barechat or run directly with npx barechat.

To test this chat app, in one terminal run:

> npx barechat soccer
[info] Created new chat room: 8f27f432fcbaa4b5180a1cc7a8fa166a93cda3c1bce6f19922dd519d02f4bb39

You can send soccer, p2p or any string you like to discover the room.

In another terminal use the same command, or the hashcode received from the first terminal's output:

> npx barechat 8f27f432fcbaa4b5180a1cc7a8fa166a93cda3c1bce6f19922dd519d02f4bb39
[info] Joined chat room 8f27f432fcbaa4b5180a1cc7a8fa166a93cda3c1bce6f19922dd519d02f4bb39

And its fully compatible to chat with barechat-web

Or you can simply call

npx barechat

Which will randomly generate a room with hashcode. By anouncing the hashcode somewhere you can chat anonymously.

Extra arguments

If you want to record the log of this chat, can add --store argument to save chat into a text file.

# Store logs in default file (./barechat.txt)
npx barechat --store

# Store logs in specific file
npx barechat --store /tmp/chatlog.txt

If you want to disable the RPC server, can add --no-rpc argument:

# Start chat without RPC server
npx barechat --no-rpc soccer

# Combine with store option
npx barechat --no-rpc --store chatlog.txt

Development

This package is part of the BareChat monorepo. See the root README for development setup instructions.

Local Development

# From the packages/cli directory
npm run dev

# Or from the root directory
bun run cli:start

Generate Documentation

npm run doc

Using BareChat as a Package

To make variant chat experience, you can also import barechat/lib/chat-core in your project.

import { getBackend } from 'barechat/lib/chat-core'
const {
  swarm,
  getMemberId,
  createRoom,
  joinRoom,
  sendMessage
} = getBackend()

Read chat-core API in API doc

Reference

• Basically followed Making a Pear Terminal Application but built with bare and distill the reusable chat-core

License

MIT

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.