MERN CHAT E2EE 🗨️

Baatchit is a modern real-time chat application designed to facilitate seamless communication between users. With Baatchit, users can engage in conversations, share files, see when others are typing, and more, all in real-time.

Features ✨

• 🔒 End-to-End Encryption: Ensure your private chats are secure with advanced encryption, protecting your messages from unauthorized access.
• 🔑 Private Key Recovery: Recover your private encryption key securely through a password-protected and MFA email verification process, ensuring you never lose access to your encrypted messages.
• 📲 Push Notifications: Stay updated with instant push notifications, ensuring you never miss a message even when the app is closed.
• 💬 Real-time Messaging: Instantly send and receive messages with other users.
• 🤝 Friends Feature: Connect with other users and engage in private chats or group conversations after adding them as friends.
• 👥 Group Chats: Create and participate in group chats with multiple users.
• 🟢 User Presence: See who's online and available for chat in real-time.
• ⌨️ Typing Indicators: See when other users are typing to enhance communication flow.
• ✔️ Message Seen Status: Know when your messages have been seen by other users.
• ✏️ Edit Messages: Edit your messages in real-time, with updates reflected instantly for all users and an indication that the message has been edited.
• 😀 Message Reactions: React to messages with emojis to express your feelings and engage more interactively, including double-tap to like or unlike a message.
• 🗑️ Delete Message: Delete messages after sending them ensuring full control over your conversation
• 📁 File Sharing: Share files and documents securely within chats.
• 🎉 GIF Sending: Express yourself with animated GIFs using the integrated Tenor GIF library.
• 📊 Polling: Send polls with either multiple votes set to true or false, allowing users to gather opinions and feedback.
• 🔒 OAuth Integration: Sign in easily using social login options like GitHub and Google.
• 📱 Progressive Web App (PWA): Install the app on your phone or desktop and enjoy a native app-like experience.

Technologies Used 🛠️

Frontend Technologies Used:

• ⚛️ React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
• 🔗 React Router Dom: Declarative routing for React applications.
• 🛠️ Redux Toolkit: An opinionated, batteries-included toolset for efficient Redux development.
• 🔄 Socket.IO Client: Real-time bidirectional event-based communication library for web applications.
• 📑 React Hook Form: Performant, flexible, and extensible forms with easy-to-use validation.
• 📝 Zod: A TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library.
• 🎥 Framer Motion: A production-ready motion library for React.
• 🎬 Lottie React: Render After Effects animations on React-based web apps.
• 🖼️ Gif Picker React: Provides a simple and easy-to-use UI for selecting GIFs.
• 🔔 React Hot Toast: Toast notifications for React applications.
• 💅 Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.
• 🔥 Firebase: A platform developed by Google for creating mobile and web applications, used in this project for push notifications only.
• 🧠 Lodash: A JavaScript library which provides utility functions for common programming tasks.
• 📅 Date-fns: Modern JavaScript date utility library.
• 🛡️ React Helmet Async: Handle changes to the document head in a React application.
• 🦺 TypeScript: A typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
• ⚡ Vite: A build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects.
• 🔌 Vite Plugin PWA: Plugin for adding PWA capabilities to Vite applications.

Backend Technologies Used:

• 🟢 Node.js: A JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.
• 🌐 Express: Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js.
• 🔄 Socket.IO: Real-time bidirectional event-based communication library for Node.js.
• 📂 MongoDB (with Mongoose): A NoSQL database for storing application data.
• 🔒 Bcryptjs: Library for hashing passwords.
• ☁️ Cloudinary: Cloud-based image and video management service.
• 🔓 Cors: Middleware for handling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
• 🔧 Dotenv: Module to load environment variables from a .env file.
• 🛡️ Helmet: Middleware to secure Express apps by setting various HTTP headers.
• 🔐 Jsonwebtoken: Library to create and verify JSON Web Tokens (JWTs).
• 📈 Morgan: HTTP request logger middleware for Node.js.
• 📤 Multer: Middleware for handling multipart/form-data, primarily used for file uploads.
• 📧 Nodemailer: Module for sending emails from Node.js applications.
• 🔑 Passport: Authentication middleware for Node.js.
• 🔍 Passport-Google-Oauth20: Passport strategy for authenticating with Google using OAuth 2.0.
• 🔢 UUID: Library for generating universally unique identifiers (UUIDs).
• 🍪 Cookie: Simple cookie parsing and serialization.
• 🍪 Cookie-Parser: Parse Cookie header and populate req.cookies with an object keyed by cookie names.
• 🔥 Firebase Admin: Firebase Admin SDK for access to Firebase services.
• 🧩 Zod: TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library.
• 🛠️ Typescript: A typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
• 🔧 Concurrently: Run multiple commands concurrently.
• 🔧 Cross-Env: Run scripts that set and use environment variables across platforms.
• ♻️ Nodemon: Automatically restart Node.js applications on code changes.
• 🛠️ Pre-Commit: Pre-commit hook runner.
• 🚮 Rimraf: A deep deletion module for Node.js.

Getting Started 🚀

To get started with Baatchit, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/RishiBakshii/Baatchit
2. Navigate to the project directory: cd Baatchit

Setting Up Environment Variables 🌐

Before starting the application, ensure you set up the necessary environment variables. Both the frontend and backend have a .env.example file provided. Follow these steps:

1. Copy the provided .env.example file: Use this file to create your own .env file in both the frontend and backend directories.

2. Update .env with your credentials: Open the .env file in each directory (frontend and backend) and replace the placeholder values with your actual credentials and secrets. This includes API keys, database URLs, and any other sensitive information required by the application.

3. Set up Firebase Admin credentials:

   • In the backend/src directory, create a file named firebase-admin-cred.json.
   • Place your Firebase service account credentials in this file. Ensure the path to this file matches the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable in your .env file. For example:

     GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=src/firebase-admin-cred.json
     

   • If you choose a different name or path for the credentials file, make sure the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS variable reflects this.

4. Save and verify: Save the .env files once you have updated them with your details. Verify that all necessary variables are correctly set to ensure the application functions as intended.

5. Important: Do not commit your .env files to version control systems like Git (ensure they are listed in your .gitignore files).

Installing Dependencies and Starting the Application 🛠️

Now that you have set up your environment variables, proceed with the following steps to install dependencies and start the frontend and backend servers:

1. Frontend:

   • Open a terminal and navigate to the frontend directory: cd frontend
   • Install dependencies: npm install
   • Start the frontend development server: npm run dev
   • Visit http://localhost:5173 in your browser to access the frontend application.

2. Backend:

   • Open another terminal (or split your terminal window if supported) and navigate to the backend directory: cd ../backend
   • Install dependencies: npm install
   • Start the backend server: npm run dev
   • Ensure the backend server is running correctly to support the frontend functionalities.

Tip: Using Split Terminals

To manage frontend and backend servers simultaneously:

• VS Code: Right-click on the terminal and choose "Split Terminal." Navigate to the frontend and backend directories in separate terminals for easy monitoring.

Running the Application with Docker 🐳

You can also use Docker to containerize and run Baatchit. Follow these steps to set up and run the application using Docker:

1. Build and Start Containers:

   • Ensure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your machine.
   • Open a terminal and navigate to the project directory: cd Baatchit
   • Build and start the containers: docker-compose up --build

2. Access the Application:

   • The frontend will be available at http://localhost:5173
   • The backend will be available at http://localhost:8000
   • MongoDB will be available at mongodb://localhost:27017

3. Stopping the Containers:

   • To stop the containers, press Ctrl+C in the terminal where docker-compose is running.
   • Alternatively, you can run: docker-compose down to stop and remove the containers.

Contributing 🤝

Contributions are welcome! If you'd like to contribute to Baatchit, please follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch: git checkout -b feature-name
3. Make your changes and commit them: git commit -am 'Add new feature'
4. Push to the branch: git push origin feature-name
5. Submit a pull request.

Announcement 🟢

• Baatchit's codebase will be shifted to Next-js very soon

Contact 📧

For any inquiries or feedback, please contact me at [email protected].