LiveChat

LiveChat is a sytem built upon express4/socket.io/babel which offers chatting functionality over HTTP.

CLI

The supported CLI commands are:

• exit - close server and exit cli
• quit - close cli but keep server open
• system comm - execute a system command
• restart - restart server and cli
• clear - clear cli output
• logs - view logs
• erase - erase logs
• say id msg - send message to a client identified by his socket.io id
• sayall msg - send message to all clients connected
• eval comm - send a command to be eval'd locally on client's pc
• refresh [clientId] - refresh all client browsers or a specific one
• help command - command(s) help

When no command is passed but a message is given, it's executed locally on the server
default commands prefix is '.', start all commands with this except the server-eval

Browser Commands

There are several in-chat commands too:

• disconnect - Close WebSocket (which by default causes browser refresh in 5 seconds)
• admin pass - Login as admin through chat to unlock more commands

Current chat prefix is !!
Inline commands also exist!!

• $bBOLD$b, $iItalic$i, $uUnderline$u, $USR(username), $d(date)

escape them as $\b

Other Features

• When the server main files are changed, the server automatically reloads unless the environmental variable BLOCKRELOAD is passed,
  Similarily, when client/JS files are edited they get converted to ES5 and served under client/JS5, they get minified and Flow-compiled aswell,
  Block the automatic rebuild with the BLOCKBUILD environmental variable.
• The default serving path can be changed from ./client to a custom one through config.json
• You can force babel compilation with npm run build but this requires the package to be installed as --save-dev and default standards to be followed.
• The server works with the Node-builtin cluster module and communicates with each shard with an ipc socket (not redis!)
• The server auto-restarts on fatal/syntax errors and abnormal quits and catches globally unhandled errors.
• Serving the special .htmx/.htmlx/.jsx/.cssx files leads to the translation of @@\expression@@\ expressions in them before serving. Appending a \ (escape sequence) after the @@ escapes the whole expression from being evaluated (like this example).
• There are also the special .xtml/.xtm/.xjs/.xcss files that get processed once at launch-time.

Note that these evaluations happen server-side!!

• The history of the last 50 messages posted is kept but discarded upon server restart. The max history size can be adjusted from the config.json file together with the passwords.
• There's also a spam filter that disallows sending requests faster than 800ms, change threshold in config.json