command-line-chat

A simple command line chat app to communicate via the terminal. I'm new to networking so sorry if some of my terminology or code is messed up.

• sending messages
• recieving messages
• setting nicknames
• handling client disconnection
• somehow make the server public
• encrypt the messages with end-to-end encryption (like whatsapp)
• make this web based (this will be a whole project on it's own, allowing for image and emoji sending, and everything you would expect from a general purpose chat app)

Usage

If you want to run the files locally

• On the server computer, run server.py, This will create a server on the host IP address and on port 6080
• On each client computer, run client.py, Then input the IP address printed out by server.py, create a nickname and you should be connected to the chat room

If you want to connect to my public server

• Just run client.py and connect to 213.219.37.71
• This will most likely be offline but it's worth a try.

sending messages

To send messages I've created my own little protocol where when the user wants to send a message, two packets are sent: a header and the actual message

• The header contains a padded message of 64 bytes that contains the length of the actual message.
• The actual message contains the actual content and it is efficiently read to the exact number of bytes it contains, not wasting bandwidth

Recieving messages

When a client sends a message to the server, the server loops through a list of all clients, ignoring the sender. It then sends the original clients message, along with their nickname, to each other client

Nicknames

The nicknames are stored on the server in a dictionary, where the string of the connection object is the key, and the nickname is the value. By default each nickname is just the address of the client, but it can be changed by sending !NICK mynickname