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Show HN: Let's Chat, a self-hosted chat app for small teams
- onassar 12y agoAwesome stuff @hhaidar! I'm sure a bunch of people will love the fact that logs and data exist on their servers. I'm sure it'll resolve some privacy/internal regulation concerns. Also, hi from Toronto! I work out of CSI at Bloor + Bathurst. Nice to see another Torontonian on here :)
- hhaidar 12y agoThanks, this means a lot to us :) We're around Adelaide and University, not too far from your neck of the woods!
- jMyles 12y agomigrootions? :-)
- hhaidar 12y agoYea I know, adorably hilarious!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Brendinooo 12y agoVery nice work! And thanks so much for making it open source. Our company is always looking for an open-source solution that would let us move off of Hangouts, and this might just be the vehicle for that someday. XMPP, chat history, @mentions, local hosting, and open source...a great combo. The only major thing that's missing that we'd need is private chat! Hope to see that as a feature someday.
- hhaidar 12y agoThanks! Private is pretty much first on our list for the next release. We use hangouts as well and it's definitely a pain point to juggle multiple apps.
- tracker1 12y agoWill you be using WebRTC for the chat interface?
- hhaidar 12y agoPossibly. I think it'll be a while before we do any audio/video stuff. We're actually just two guys with full time jobs and this is our "10% Time" at work, so our time is a little strained. I'm hoping to get some pull requests from strangers which I've heard are the best kind of pull requests!
- janvdberg 12y agoI literally just came from the Slack site to HN wondering if there was an opensource/selfhosting version of something like Slack. Well I guess that question is answered.
- qznc 12y agoThere is also Kandan App. https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan
- hhaidar 12y agoIs Kandan still actively developed? Doesn't seem like there's been anything new for a couple of years.
- xasos 12y agoIt may not be as actively developed as something like Node, but people are still submitting PRs and the original author is still making updates.
- eggbrain 12y agoYep, we still are! I recently got added to the ownership team for Kandan (https://github.com/orgs/kandanapp/people https://github.com/orgs/kandanapp/people) and I've been trying to respond to every issue / pull request that's been submitted. If there's a feature you are missing, let me know. Our last commit was 22 days ago, and we've added a ton of bug fixes, optimizations, security fixes, and overall tweaks in the past few years. Check us out! Recently, the thing I've been focusing on lately with the app is bug fixes, small tweaks, and upgrading Rails. There's a lot of feature requests on the backburner, but I want the app to be extremely stable before going a mile wide and an inch deep. That being said, "Let's Chat" looks like it is a great approach and I look forward to the progress that comes on it. The more open source solutions, the better.
- DevFactor 12y agoeggbrain, I really like Kanban and I am sad to see it isn't up to rails 4.2 yet. Are you looking for more contributors? If so, how could I contact you to resolve a few questions so I can get the current repo up and running to work on?
- hughes 12y agoI was about to say "come on, nothing beats IRC", but then I remembered how I always wanted IRC to have LDAP, XMPP, and a REST API. So... can I connect with my IRC client?
- hhaidar 12y agoI mean, you can always fork it :)
- TeMPOraL 12y agoI want it the other way - let's clone all those shiny features and make a pretty, nongeek-friendly client. IRC protocol can be extended to handle all that stuff.
- unknownian 12y agoPeople have been working on stuff like that. I dunno if they are super baked yet but https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere https://github.com/ircanywhere/ircanywhere
- cheald 12y agoIf it speaks standard XMPP you can use Bitlbee to connect to it via your IRC client.
- fiatjaf 12y agoI just deployed to Heroku with the button and the home page gives me a "Moved temporarily". Later a 503 application error.
- ehsanf 12y agoYou should probably file it as a bug or ask for support on github rather than HN! :)
- chrishas35 12y agoSame here. Looks like "TypeError: secret required" from the heroku logs.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sibartlett 12y agoThanks for letting us know about the issue! It's now fixed if you wish to try again :)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sibartlett 12y agoThanks for letting us know about the issue! It's now fixed if you wish to try again :)
- mandeepj 12y agoSomething similar https://github.com/JabbR/JabbR https://github.com/JabbR/JabbR
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- NicoJuicy 12y agoJabbR is also very neat, it's a .Net project and actively being developped. I installed it for my company (everyone here knows c# and asp.net mvc ) It's the best project that shows SignalR ( a real time js framework on the .Net platform)
- sinak 12y agoThis is really great. Two big missing features preventing us from switching away from Slack are direct messages and mobile push notifications. The latter is hard to do: push is highly centralized, which is really bad for self-hosted/open source software. But DMs are totally doable.
- sibartlett 12y agoPrivate/direct messaging is the next big feature we will be adding :)
- scott_karana 12y ago> The latter is hard to do: push is highly centralized, which is really bad for self-hosted/open source software Why is this the case? I would have thought it's the same in principle whether it's a central Slack server, or a central FooMumble server running Let's Chat. (Difficulty of implementation might be high, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about?)
- thedufer 12y agoThere are basically two options and they both suck. Either publish one app and distribute the push notification cert (terrible idea) or each hosted site needs it's own cert and thus an Apple account/published app (pain in the ass).
- scott_karana 12y agoGotcha, I didn't realize that APNS was involved here. :)
- driverdan 12y agoPush is fairly easy to do. There are JS libs for both Google and Apple push services. The hardest part is getting all of your Apple certs setup correctly. Then you just create a simple Cordova app to register devices.
- nogridbag 12y agoNeat. What's the purpose of the "slug" when creating the room? I was expecting it to be the URL slug, such as http://localhost:5000/#!/room/my-room http://localhost:5000/#!/room/my-room (and quickly noticed hyphens in the slug name caused a validation error...).
- hhaidar 12y agoIt's mainly for XMPP (room slugs are used as the identifiers there). Also try typing in #ROOMNAME in the textbox! You can link to rooms like that.
- arobertson 12y agoSlightly off topic but everyone here seems somewhat interested in open source self hosted solutions, so check out http://selfhosted.reddit.com http://selfhosted.reddit.com
- alfg 12y agoThis looks great. Thanks for making it open-source. I've tried other self-hosted chat apps, but this one looks promising. IRC integration would be great. :) When I was experimenting with websockets, I wanted to make a simple chat app that integrates with Github projects. Of course, not nearly as feature rich, but just an experiment to learn. Source with demo: https://github.com/alfg/chathub-client https://github.com/alfg/chathub-client
- hhaidar 12y agoThat looks pretty neat. Also +1 for having a demo!
- smhx 12y agoFor github projects, I've been using http://gitter.im http://gitter.im I've found the integration to be awesome and well thought-out.
- sayanchowdhury 12y agoYou can have a look at Waartaa - https://github.com/waartaa/waartaa https://github.com/waartaa/waartaa
- ledzep2 12y ago+1 for the demo. If there's a 1click2heroku script for this, it will be golden~
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- calebm 12y agoAny plans for search functionality?
- hhaidar 12y agoYup, it's in the works for the next release.
- misiti3780 12y agoThis looks amazing - I recently had to add chat functionality to a web service (self-hosted) and was very much surprised at the crappy options out there. I ended up going with converse.js but the django support was lacking and the whole thing took a lot longer than i thought it was going to take (but then again , it always does) I might test this out and actually swap them out if it works well.
- hhaidar 12y agoDamn, I can't tell you how awesome this makes me feel. Is your service open source or public?
- ZoF 12y agoS/he was talking about adding chat to one of his/her sites(or customer's sites) using conversejs[0] which is indeed opensource. [0]-https://conversejs.org/ https://conversejs.org/
- hhaidar 12y agoAh great, thanks!
- misiti3780 12y agothe website i had to add it to is closed-source, but as someone below indicated, converse.js is open source. the actual code base of converse.js isnt bad - but no one was responsive on github as of a few months ago - and that was a huge problem
- filmgirlcw 12y agoThis is great! We use Slack at work and for our uses wouldn't move away from it (we're paying and all), BUT for small teams/private projects/miscellaneous stuff, I absolutely love this. Great work!
- sagivo 12y agoi like the auto heroku deploy. brilliant move by heroku. a note - in chrome canery the browser crushes after login.
- sagivo 12y agoLive Demo: http://chat.sagivo.com http://chat.sagivo.com
- eitland 12y agoYou guys should mention MIT license in the title, I didn't click earlier today because I thought it was a paid hosted solution. (Nothing against paid, I'm just browsing as tinkering me atm : )
- jonsterling 12y ago> Let's Chat is a persistent messaging application that runs on Node.js and MongoDB nope nope nope
- Yadi 12y agoThis is so so awesome!
- hhaidar 12y agoDamn. What's wrong with Hacker News today? Everyone is being amazing!
- Yadi 12y agoHah! No for real! Iove this, while ago I worked on something similar based on Rails for a startup, but I left it half way through. Any plans to provide updates and take it to the next step?
- rambot 12y agoOur actual job is working on SD Elements (http://securitycompass.com/sdelements/ http://securitycompass.com/sdelements/). Let's Chat is just a side project, but it's also something we use internally everyday. The features you wish were there we also wish were there, no doubt. Lots of the developers here like working on it. I expect there will be updates from us for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we'll start getting more external pull requests as well. I doubt we are going to pivot to a free chat client company any time soon.
- Yadi 12y agoThat sounds good my friend!
- trevordev 12y agoI setup lets chat at a small start up I was at about 2 years and it worked very well then and im happy that it looks even better now. Will definitely consider it in the future.
- Poiesis 12y agoIs there a way to change user avatars? The screenshot has them but I can't find it in 0.3.2. BTW the wiki page for Docker references release/0.3.0, but you don't have that branch naming prefix (release/).
- notsrg 12y ago0.3.0 is now merged into master
- jaymzcampbell 12y agoI think they are using Gravatar (https://en.gravatar.com/ https://en.gravatar.com/) to pull them in based on your email as it surprised me for a second when I set it up locally, registered and then my current profile photo was already there.
- hhaidar 12y agoYup, Let's Chat uses Gravatar!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- notsrg 12y agoWhoops, I forgot to answer your first question. But yes, we are using Gravatar.
- Poiesis 12y agoAh, I assume the reason we all get identical avatars is that gravatar api access gets stopped by the corporate proxy. Any chance that's easily configurable? You're probably going to see a lot of corporate use by places who insist on self hosting everything so you might want to consider dealing with avatars yourself.
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- jdcaron 12y agoI think you guys should change the behaviour regarding the focus of the text box. If I start typing in the chat window, and my cursor didn't activate the text box, it doesn't type.
- hhaidar 12y agoOh weird, what browsing are you using?
- aagha 12y agoAnyone ever tried kato.im? It seems free.
- maxwin 12y agoNice. My team uses mobile phones a lot for messaging. I will try to wrap it into a native mobile app so that people can get notification
- ttty 12y ago> Let<span class="lc-love">'</span>s That's why the ' in Let's is red!
- mijoharas 12y agoCould anyone tell me whether this supports markdown and whether it supports syntax highlighting? (kanban too if anyone knows). I tried reading on the respective github project pages but couldn't see anything related to those two questions.
- reinhardt1053 12y agoBasically an open-source version of Slack. Nice work! https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/
- rambot 12y agoWe started the project back in 2012. It's an open source version of Campfire. :)
- ttty 12y agoI've reviewed the code of this project here: http://hackhat.com/p/130/lets-chat-analysis/ http://hackhat.com/p/130/lets-chat-analysis/ Topics: - Code organization; - Deployment; - Migrootions (mongoose migrations); - Templates; - Module loader; - CSS;
- unwind 12y agoYou are, perhaps, somewhat overusing various graphical effects on that page. Consider toning it down. At least for me, reading it was too annoying so I stopped. I realize this makes me superficial but I prefer my reading material to STAND STILL so I can look at it. I feel so old.
- bovermyer 12y agoThis is great, good work. I just have one small quibble: did it HAVE to look identical to Slack? Branding and all, you know.
- schuettla 12y agoThis is really some great piece of software
- hhaidar 12y agoYou're pretty great yourself :D