ably-chat-component

v1.0.9

Published

a month ago

Real time chat from Ably - just add your own API key!

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chat realtime websockets ably

README

The Ably Chat Component is a WebComponent that demos real-time chat using Ably, right in your browser.

To run this web component in dev mode, in your terminal type:

npm run start

Usage

You have to import our code as a module to load the Web Component into the DOM. The easiest way is using a service like skypack that will stream the code directly from our npm package.

An up-to-date Ably JavaScript SDK is required to be loaded before the Web Component is used as our component specifically uses the Ably SDK.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Ably Chat</title>
    
    <script src="https://cdn.ably.io/lib/ably.min-1.js" lang="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="https://cdn.skypack.dev/ably-chat-component" type="module"></script>
</head>
<body>    
    <ably-chat
        data-api-key="your-ably-api-key-here">
    </ably-chat>
</body>
</html>

You will want to use Ably Token Authentication for production.

Configuration

The component can be configured through setting attributes.

Authentication

While you're developing or testing, you can set your API key using data-api-key.

<ably-chat data-api-key="your-api-key-here-for-dev"></ably-chat>

This is INSECURE. It makes your PRIVATE API key available to the public and you should never do this in a production system. It is, however, useful for testing.

When you're deploying to production you'll want to use createTokenRequest to create a temporary authentication token. Typically this will involve storing your API key in a server side component, and exposing a URL for the Ably SDK to call.

You can configure this by setting the data-get-token-url attribute.

<ably-chat data-get-token-url="https://my-token-api.com/createTokenRequest"></ably-chat>

This is the recommended way to include Ably API keys in front-end components.

Specifying channel names

You can specify which channels to use for publishing and for subscribing:

<ably-chat data-publish-channel="chat" data-subscribe-channel="chat"></ably-chat>

If either of these are not specified, it will default to chat. Usually you will want both the publish and subscribe channels to be the same, to enable clients to talk directly to one another. In some scenarios you may want to have some form of processing occur on the message before being sent to other clients.

An example of this would be having a server perform filtering on messages before making them available to other clients. You could publish the messages to chat-output, which the server is subscribed to. The server could filter out any banned words, and then send a message to chat-input for all the other clients to then see the result.

Setting up token authentication

Once you have signed up for Ably and have your own API key you can use the AWS Lambda function in ./api/createTokenRequest.js if you'd like to create your own token endpoint.

If you run npm install and zip/upload the resulting directory (including the node_modules) directory to a Lambda + API Gateway, you can be up and running in no time.

The Lambda Function in api/createTokenRequest expects an environment variable to be configured called ABLY_API_KEY with your API key in it.

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