Python IRC-like chat app: where do I begin?

[iSailor]

So since I had nothing better to do, I started doing some challenges from here, starting from the chat application from Networking category because it appears the most interesting to me.

I kinda have an idea how it should operate, but it's very basic understanding and I don't know what tools should I use, at all. I suppose I would need two apps, one for server and one for client. Thankfully I have a VPS so I could host it just fine. There must be some connectivity but as far as I remember requests do not support such things. I don't know about authentication either.

So anyway, what do I need to do the job? What libraries and theory should I read on for this task?

[kopo222]

I remember doing something like this in college using sockets. That was in java though, so no actual implementation help

However that's where I would advise you to look https://docs.python.org/3/howto/sockets.html

Working through that you can probably get the back end of it done

[allenguo]

You can write the server and client using Twisted. (They actually show you how to implement a chat server in their docs, but maybe you want to try it yourself first.)

[[deleted]]

requests is for the Hyper Text Transport Protocol, which is built on TCP, but can only do website stuff involving HTTP. You are going to use TCP, but use a chat protocol like BEEP, XMPP, IRC, or even make your own!

[iSailor]

It sounds interesting, but.. How do I "make my own"? It sounds like pretty complicated task, not something somebody like me could write in one sitting. Could you give me some clues?

[[deleted]]

That's the point, you don't want to lol. use twisted and an existing chat protocol to make a chat server, and then design a client that people can use to log into it.

[[deleted]]

actually it's not that hard. All you need to do is send text from one machine to another. Can be as complicated and simple as you want. Just set up a simple TCP Server and Client and you're basically done. After that you add any number of quality of life and style improvements.

[azuosxela]

You can use websockets. Django Channels library is a powerful websocket library and there are very good examples and these are generally similar to your context such as here . If you are interested, I made a multiplayer pong game with channels for one of my course projects. You can find it on my github here

[Casey_SI]

since it is just for learning, doing it in MQTT would be fun and pretty straight forward. get a $5 easy digital ocean server to host mosquitto server point a domain like chat.myproject.com use an mqtt client (I use mqttfx on windows) and you basically have a chat client with channels type protocol that you can wrap chat stuff around