cmdchat

Omegle for programmers, over the terminal. Fire it up, get randomly paired with a stranger, chat while you code. Text only, nothing persisted, no accounts.

How it works

• server.js — a WebSocket server that holds a queue of waiting clients. As soon as 2 are waiting, it pairs them and relays messages between them.
• client.js — the CLI you actually run. Connects to the server, shows a prompt, prints incoming messages.

Run it locally

npm install

# terminal 1 — start the server
npm run server

# terminal 2 — connect as a client
npm start

# terminal 3 — connect as a second client, gets auto-matched with terminal 2
npm start

Commands inside the client:

• /skip — leave your current stranger, get requeued for a new match
• /quit — disconnect and exit

Tags and nicknames

Match with people who share an interest instead of pure random:

node client.js --tags rust,debugging --name sam
# short flags also work
node client.js -t rust,debugging -n sam

How tag matching works:

• You're matched first against anyone waiting with an overlapping tag (best overlap wins)
• If nobody with a shared tag shows up within ~20 seconds, the search automatically widens to anyone waiting, so a niche tag never leaves you stuck forever
• No tags specified = you're in the general pool from the start, same as v1

Built-in safety (v2)

• Heartbeat — the server pings every connection every 30s; anyone who stops responding (closed laptop, dead wifi) gets dropped and their partner is automatically requeued instead of talking to a ghost
• Per-IP connection cap — max 5 concurrent connections per IP, so one person can't flood the queue
• Rate limiting — max 20 messages per 10 seconds per connection (unchanged from v1)

Deploying the server for free (Fly.io)

It's a plain Node process that speaks WebSocket on $PORT (defaults to 8080). Fly.io's free tier fits this well — it's built for long-lived processes, gives you wss:// (TLS) automatically, and doesn't sleep on idle like some free tiers do.

# from inside the cmdchat/ directory
curl -L https://fly.io/install.sh | sh   # installs the flyctl CLI
fly auth signup                           # or fly auth login
fly launch                                # follow prompts, don't add a database
fly deploy

fly launch will generate a Dockerfile and fly.toml for you — accept the defaults (Node app, no Postgres/Redis needed). Once deployed you'll get a URL like your-app-name.fly.dev; point clients at it with wss://:

CMDCHAT_SERVER=wss://your-app-name.fly.dev node client.js

What's still NOT in here

• No accounts, no persistent history — matches Omegle's throwaway feel
• No voice/video — text only
• No /report mechanism or profanity/spam filter — worth adding before any real public traffic
• No TLS built in — the server speaks plain ws://; for a public deploy you need wss://, which most hosts (Fly.io included) give you automatically via their reverse proxy

Suggested next steps

1. Deploy the server somewhere with a real domain + wss:// (TLS) — see deploy notes above
2. Publish client.js as an npm package so people can do npx cmdchat instead of cloning the repo
3. Add /skip cooldown so people can't instantly re-roll to dodge a bad match
4. Add a /report command that logs the offending message + both nicknames somewhere you can review