firebase-chat

Backend Application for Chat with Firebase

Description

Simple chat application made with Firebase and Go Fiber.

Setup

1. Add these environment variables to .env file.

SERVER_HOST=<PORT>
SERVER_PORT=<HOST>

FIREBASE_CREDS=<JSON_CREDS_PATH>
FIREBASE_DB_URI=<FIRESTORE_PROJECT_ID>

2. Use go run . or go build to install all dependencies and run the application.

Flow

1. The user will initialize a chat first. The application tracks all participants in the chatroom. This way, aside from one-to-one or personal communication, a one-to-all or group chat communication can be done.
2. If a user send a new message, the system will track the chat in which the user send the message in. This way, the recepients of the chat can be correctly found by the system.
3. The system can then list out all chats a user has, based on the list of the participants in every chats, along with the messages in those chats.

A Bit About Firebase

First time using Firebase! Decided to use Firestore on top of Realtime Database because it has the ability to structure the database into collections. I use Firestore ability to store a subcollection (collection inside collection). In this case, each chat will have a list of messages.

API Documentation

root = /api/v1

Starting a New Chat

POST /chats
{
    "participants_id": [<user_id1>, <user_id1>, ...]
}

Returns chat_id for the newly created chat.

Sending a New Message

POST /chats/message
{
    "chat_id": <chat_id>,
    "sender_id": <sender_id>,
    "sent_at": <iso_timestamp>,
    "content": <content_text>
}

Returns message_id for the newly created message.

Get All Chats for User

GET /chats/:user_id

Returns a list of chats with corresponding messages in each chat.

Things to Improve

1. Better and more scalable models design(?)
2. A bit more on the clarity of response returned by the endpoints.