Chat Server

Overview

Backend server for a chat app.

Frontend

• https://github.com/Zheng-August/html
• https://github.com/LJC0414/GhostChat

Prerequisites

• MySQL 8.0 server

• JRE 17

Configuring database

Login to MySQL as root

CREATE DATABASE ghost_chat;
CREATE USER 'ghost_chat_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '1234';
GRANT ALL ON ghost_chat.* TO 'ghost_chat_user'@'localhost';

Running the application

Before running the application, please make sure your system environment meets the prerequisites described above and have the database configured.

cd into project root

./mvnw spring-boot:run

It can take a while when you run it for the first time, since maven would resolve and download dependencies.

Alternatively, run the program using jar file:

java -jar chat-server-xxx.jar

Building from source

./mvnw install

Packaged jar file will be located under chat-server/target/.

Deploying behind Nginx reverse proxy

Spring Boot application default listens on port 8080, and in this application, all APIs have url starting with /api.

In this case, we want all requests to http://server/api/ to be forwarded to the same machine but a different port http://server:8080/api/.

1. Edit the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and add the following settings to the server block that should provide the reverse proxy:

   location /api/ {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
      proxy_set_header Host               $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP          $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For    $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host   $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port   $server_port;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto  $scheme;
   }

2. If nginx is running on RHEL based distributions, set the httpd_can_network_connect SELinux boolean parameter to 1 to configure that SELinux allows NGINX to forward traffic:

   Learn more

   setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

3. Restart the nginx service:

   systemctl restart nginx

Rest API

Run the program with the frontend and reverse proxy set up. Visit http://server/api to read Rest API documentation.