Important Notes

This app uses separate management command, run_chat_server for running Websockets in Django context. It is intended to be used with something like Supervisor or Systemd to run asyncio webserver as a separate one from Django. We didn’t want our app to be limited to be used together with Django Channels - that’s why we did it that way.

You can find an example Systemd config to run it as a service at https://github.com/Bearle/django-private-chat/blob/dev/example.service

P.S. Don’t forget to change CHAT_WS_SERVER_HOST && CHAT_WS_SERVER_PORT && CHAT_WS_SERVER_PROTOCOL settings!

Documentation

The full documentation is (finally) at https://django-private-chat.readthedocs.io . You can also check the docstrings & this readme.

Example project

You can check out our example project by cloning the repo and heading into example/ directory. There is a README file for you to check, initial data to check out the chat included.

Customize the templates

How to customize the template? Just copy:

venv/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages/django_private_chat/templates/django_private_chat/dialogs.html
to
yourapp/templates/django_private_chat/dialogs.html

And feel free to edit it as you like! We intentionally left the JS code inside for it to be editable easily.

Exsiting project quickstart

Install django-private-chat:

pip install django-private-chat

Migrate:

python manage.py migrate django-private-chat

Note: you can use this package with or without uvloop, just run either

python manage.py run_chat_server

or run

python manage.py run_chat_server_uvloop

Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'django_private_chat',
    ...
)

Add the server & port for your asyncio server to settings:

CHAT_WS_SERVER_HOST = 'localhost'
CHAT_WS_SERVER_PORT = 5002
CHAT_WS_SERVER_PROTOCOL = 'ws'

It is possible to change messages datetime format using

DATETIME_FORMAT

Add django-private-chat’s URL patterns:

from django_private_chat import urls as django_private_chat_urls


urlpatterns = [
    ...
    url(r'^', include('django_private_chat.urls')),
    ...
]

Add

{% block extra_js %}{% endblock extra_js %}

to your base template

Now you can start a dialog using

/dialogs/some_existing_username

To create a WSS (TLS) server instead:

python manage.py run_chat_server "path/to/cert.pem"

(also works with uvloop). The “cert.pem” file should be a plaintext PEM file containing first a private key, then a certificate (may be a concatenation of a .key and a .crt file). Please note that wss will use TLSv1 by default for python 3.5 & 3.4 and will use ssl.PROTOCOL_TLS_SERVER for 3.6 and above. Features ——–

-:white_check_mark: Uses current app model (get_user_model() and settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

-:white_check_mark: Translatable (uses ugettext and {% trans %} )

-:white_check_mark: One-to-one user chat

-:white_check_mark: Works using WebSockets

-:white_check_mark: Works (optionally) using WSS (TLS) connections (disclaimer - security not guaranteed)

-:white_check_mark: Displays online/offline status

-:white_check_mark: Display typing/not typing status

-:white_check_mark: Soft deletable message model - be sure to keep messages to comply with message-keeping laws

-:white_check_mark: Flash the dialog button when the user you are not currently talking to wrote you a message

-:point_right: TODO: add a dialog to the list when new one started

-:point_right: TODO: add user-not-found and other alerts

-:point_right: possible Redis backend intergration

Running Tests

Does the code actually work?

source <YOURVIRTUALENV>/bin/activate
(myenv) $ pip install tox
(myenv) $ tox

Credits

Tools used in rendering this package:

• Cookiecutter

• cookiecutter-djangopackage

History