quchat is a chat room service written from scratch in Rust. My main purpose for it was to enable local server deployment, allowing a terminal-based client to connect, create rooms, and start chatting. It is still a work in progress, and I personally haven't tested it a lot, so it may contain some bugs. While chat services typically have numerous features, I focused on implementing the core capabilities of a chat application to to make the base functionalities working.

Current Features:

• JWT authentication
• Create and read list of rooms
• Receive updates in room list when a room has new messages
• Mark rooms as seen
• Get live updates of messages inside a room
• Send text messages

How to Run It:

To run the server locally, define the IP address of the machine where you want to host the server in chat-room-server/Rocket.toml. Then, run the clients and enter the server address that you configured on the welcome page.

Server:

The server uses Rocket for most interactions, which are handled through HTTP requests.

• For live updates, it utilizes Rocket's EventStream feature.
• For authentication, I implemented JWT without relying on external libraries.
• It uses SQLite for data persistence; however, I plan to replace it with Redis and PostgreSQL later for improved performance.

Client:

The client uses Ratatui for rendering in the terminal. Since the application can end up in complicated states, I defined all states and actions in enum formats and used a state machine to manage actions and produce their corresponding states. It utilizes multiple tokio spawn and channels to handle networking and long-running tasks, preventing UI freezing. A lightweight reqwest wrapper is also used for all networking communication with the server.