lkingsford / sockettestchat

An experiment to learn LiteNetLib and a little Avalonia

SockChat

About

SockChat was an experiment to learn about how to write with .net Core, sockets, LiteNetLib and Avalonia. It is a very basic chat client and server that may be useful to other people to help learn from. It is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.

At the time of writing, there's a binary of the Windows version of the client available on https://www.dropbox.com/s/76ghrf9u8vb0m2t/SockChatWindows.zip?dl=0 if you want to try it out which is connected to a server I'm running. As it runs off .net core, a build should work on any OS that .net core supports.

Building

This was an experiment (not a production ready tool), so you'll need to set the SERVER and PORT constants in Client.cs to where you want your server to connect.

You need to install the .net Core SDK which you can do on Windows from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download, or on Linux from running https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh.

Once installed:

• Run the server for debugging with dotnet run --project server
• Run the client for debugging with dotnet run --project client
• Run the unit tests with dotnet test
• Publish the client for Windows with dotnet publish client -c Release -r win10-x64 -o Client-Win64
• Publish the server for Linux with dotnet publish server -c Release -r linux-x64 -o Server-Linux

Running

Client

With the publish folder, run client.exe

Server

It's recommended to run the server as a service. With a systemd distro such as Debian 10, assuming that you've copied the publish folder to /root/Server-Linux

• Create a Service file in /root/Server-Linux/SockChat.Service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description="SockChat"
After=network.target

[Service]
User=root
Group=root
WorkingDirectory=/root/Server-Linux
ExecStart=/root/Server-Linux/server

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

• Add the service to systemd

ln /root/Server-Linux/SockChat.service /etc/systemd/system/SockChat.service

• Start the service

service SockChat start