TKL Chat — A Cross-Platform Chat Room

TKL Chat is a modern, cross-platform chat room application built with a Rust backend and TypeScript frontend. It supports real-time messaging via WebSockets and is containerised using Docker for easy setup.

Getting Started

Follow the steps below to get up and running with TKL Chat:

⚠️ Make sure you've defined all required fields from .env.example in your .env file before proceeding.

1. Start Docker Containers

docker compose -f "compose.yaml" -p "chat" up -d

This command will launch all necessary services defined in compose.yaml. Alternatively, to run the application without uploading images to Docker Hub, there is a separate Docker Compose file. To run the dev version:

docker compose -f "compose.dev.yaml" -p "chat-dev" up -d

⚠️ Without nginx running on Docker, the ports for each service will differ while developing, please keep this in mind.

2. Access the Application

Now, from your browser or the TKL Chat app, you can run the application correctly. The API is accessible at 127.0.0.1:8080.

Initialising the Database (not required if running Docker Compose)

cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres
diesel setup
diesel migration run

This command will setup the PostgreSQL database.

Building the service images

To build each service's Docker image, in the root directory, run:

docker build -f services/{service_name}/Dockerfile -t {your_username}/tklchat-{service_name}:0.1.0-build1 .

Cleaning Up

To remove containers and their volumes completely:

docker compose -f "compose.yaml" down -v

Tech Stack

Languages

Frameworks & Libraries

Tooling

Contributing

We welcome contributions! To get started:

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a new branch (git checkout -b feature/my-feature)
3. Commit your changes
4. Push to the branch
5. Open a Pull Request

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE for details.