#Chat Server Chat server is a proof of concept real time communication server written in php
The basic requirements are outlined below. Making a compatible server is beyond the scope of this guide.
- PHP >= 5.4 < 5.6
- Symfony >= 2.6-Beta
- ZeroMQ system library (for real-time socket based messages)
- ZeroMQ php library (installable via pecl)
- MySQL or Sqlite for DB (depends on the environment, sqlite is not configured by default)
- PHP composer
Additionally requires these items:
- Ruby (tested with 2.1+)
- Capistrano (Ruby gem)
- Capifony (Ruby gem for capistrano which only works with Capistrano 2 and not 3)
- capistrano_rsync_with_remote_cache (Ruby gem for rsync copies)
- Selenium2 for functional testing (included in git)
- ChromeDriver for Selenium2 (must be installed by you)
Symfony requirements can be checked via:
php app/check.php
Composer can be installed:
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
In this guide composer is installed globally by moving it into the path as composer
- Clone this repository -
git clone git@github.com:dleute/chatserver.git myfolder - In that folder Run composer install -
composer install - Setup local hosts file with domain if necessary
- Setup apache or use the php built-in server (beyond scope)
- Copy app/config/parameters.yml.dist to app/config/parameters.yml
- Edit app/config/parameters.yml for your db systems (composer may prompt you for this)
chatserver.allofzero.com is the domain used in this example. Please replace with your own domain (or use it in hosts which may be easier) chatdeploy.allofzero.com is the domain used for live deployment. This is the same system in the included capistrano deploy script.
The first time you want to populate your database you need to run:
./app/console doctrine:database:create to create the database
./app/console doctrine:schema:update --force to update the database structure
For usage and testing a fixtures file is included that creates a few users for you.
./app/console doctrine:fixtures:load - WARNING: this will destroy the current database and re-populate it for the environment. By default it's the dev environment.
On the system that needs additional users:
./app/console fos:user:create and follow the prompts. (be sure to provide the environment with --env= if you use different db config)
The socket server allows clients to connect and get real-time notification of others activity.
The following command takes 2 ports. Please use these as they are hard coded in some places for now. One port accepts communication from clients (8080) and the other listens for messages from the app server to send to clients (5555).
./app/console chat:server 8080 5555 - By default this command will launch in the dev environment and enable debugging.
./app/console chat:server 8080 5555 -e prod - Will launch in the prod environment with no debugging
If everything is configured, going here will show you the welcome page:
- go to
http://chatserver.allofzero.com/app_dev.php/
You should be able to login with one of the generated users.
Two types of testing are implemented. Unit and Functional. Unit testing was only used for the core functionality of the socket process. This is because 99% of the code is based on 3rd party libraries that are unit tested independently. So doing full unit test coverage is both redundant and a waste of energy.
Functional testing is used to test the client html interface. This effectively does everything the unit testing does and more.
Run the following command to run all unit tests:
./bin/phpunit -c app
This should be entirely self contained and work once the environment is functional. The tests are located here:
src/AppBundle/Tests/
Functional testing is quite a bit more involved. It will require configuring a javascript compatible test driver. Doing all of this is beyond the scope of this document.
Selenium must be running and can be started with java -jar src/AppBundle/Resources/private/jar/selenium-server-standalone-2.44.0.jar
To run the tests execute:
./bin/behat
If everything is configured correctly, a chrome browser should pop-up, test the site and results should show at the prompt. The feature files are located here:
features
To make this easier, once you have the site working you can visit http://chatserver.allofzero.com/app_dev.php/doc/ to see the restful API.
The easiest place to debug problems is in the example HTML client. Debugging output will happen on any symfony environment that is configured for debug. By default only the dev environment has debugging enabled.
For example if you point your url's at a base app_dev.php, the javascript will include console.log info that is viewable in the browser debug inspector. In addition if the ioserver is launched in the dev environment it will output debug info at the prompt.
- configure app/config/deploy.rb for your environment (it comes pre-built for the ones above deployed to a different location on the current machine)
- run
cap deploy:setupto get your target server ready (should only need to be done once) - run
cap deployto push your app to the servers. It will restart the socket server for you.
These tasks are highly tuned toward the target server. They will need adjusting to deploy to a different distribution or environment.
The io connection itself is secured using a generated auth id. In the real world both the restful/web and io connections would be done over SSL in addition to this kind of security.
The goal was to provide something that works. It is not defensively coded. Meaning errors are not always caught gracefully. This is particularly true of the javascript code.
This readme is designed for someone that has some passing familiarity with Symfony projects. If you have not used Symfony before, I highly recommend reading documentation at www.symfony.com
The same thing applies to Ruby/Capistrano. Building a server that can run fairly standard PHP applications isn't the point of this exercise.