Django chat application

This article is about how to create a chat application or chat server using Django 2.0. This chat system depends Python 3 and Django restframework to create rest apis. Jquery ajax is using to call the api from the client side. I am using Ubuntu 16.04 to create this tutorial.

You can download the example source code from here:- https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/obt4u4udlt30k8w/chatproj.zip

After download completed, extract the folder to somewhere on your computer, then open a terminal window inside the extracted project directory. Then run the following commands to create a virtual environment and activate.

virtualenv -p python3 env

source env/bin/activate

For complete details about create a virtual environment read this article:- http://newprograminglogics.blogspot.com/2018/02/install-python-3-and-set-up-local.html

Then install Django by run this command

pip install django

Then install Django rest framework

pip install djangorestframework

Then run these commands to create migrations

python manage.py makemigrations chatapp

python manage.py migrate

All configurations completed. Now start the server using this command

python manage.py runserver

To check the functionality open http://127.0.0.1:8000/index in any browser
For reduce complexity I am not using a user login. You can simply login to chat by using your name or nickname without any log up process.

Enter your name like John , Peter in the From text box. Open the same url http://127.0.0.1:8000/index in another tab, type another name in it.
You can see the online users in the right column. Click one of the Names, you can see a chat box is opened. You can write messages in it and send to the selected user.

Watch the video tutorial (Click the gear icon and select video quality to 1080p HD, then click the full screen button for good quality)

Go to this link to subscribe to my YouTube channel to stay updated:- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxTp2yDew9m48Ch_hArOoYw