Running Locally

This project uses yarn workspaces to manage scripts and dependencies. If you do not have yarn installed you can install it by running

npm i -g yarn

With yarn installed you can install dependencies by running

yarn install

In order to run the app locally you will need to create a .env file in the root of the project with the following two environment variables:

ABLY_API_KEY=<put your api key here>
PORT=5000

Once that .env file has been created you can launch the client and server using the following commands respectively:

yarn run client

yarn run server

This will launch the client and server on your localhost at port 3000 and port 5000 respectively.

Deployment

This app is configured for Heroku with a Procfile and heroku-postbuild script.

In order to run correctly on Heroku you will need to add the ABLY_API_KEY environment variable. You can do this with the following command:

heroku config:set ABLY_API_KEY=<put your api key here>

How it works

The client directory contains a create-react-app which can be launched to connect to channels on the Ably platform. This is done using token authentication and the server folder contains an express app which provides token requests using the configured API key from an environment variable.

The client app uses Redux for state management and both incoming and outbound Ably messages are handled using Redux middleware, which can be found in client/src/app/createAblyMiddleware.ts.