Chat in a box

Playground project covering real-time and async processing patterns using a distributed chat messaging application as a business domain.

Points of Interest

• Persistent DM and Group rooms
• Cursor bidirectional pagination, infinity message threads
• Unread message trackers, notifications
• Async persistence message jobs
• Tokenized auth
• Load/performance tests with k6 and chat activity simulation
• Observability and containerization

Tech Stack

• Next.js / React, TanStack Query, Tailwind, Radix / Shadcn
• NestJS, Socket.IO, BullMQ, Drizzle
• Redis, PostgreSQL
• Contracts via Zod
• Package builds with tsdown
• Vitest, k6
• Turborepo
• Traefik, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alloy + Exporters, Ofelia for Scheduling

Run

Infrastructure:

• Prepare .env file
• make infra will spin up Redis and PostgreSQL containers

Standalone:

• pnpm push to apply SQL schema
• pnpm seed for tests / pnpm seed:full for load simulation
• pnpm dev / pnpm build

Simulation:

• pnpm simulator to run a process with virtual pre seeded users posting intervaled messages from a message pool, configurable via .env variables

Tests:

• pnpm test -F [packagename] covers integration tests of NestJS app packages

Docker:

• Generate certs for traefik https in docker/traefik/certs
• Prepare docker/.env.docker file
• Run infrastructure
• make init for pushing/seeding once
• make up starts all services behind Traefik
• make obs for observability stack
• make perf SCENARIO=[scenario file path] for k6 tests
• make simulator for chat activity simulation

Diagrams

Authentication Sequence

Sending Message Async Sequence

Reading Message Direct/Write-behind Sequence