Messaged

A Rails Engine for Hotwire Turbo-powered instant messaging.

The author would personally recommend against using this Gem if your Rails application is not built for Turbo Rails.

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Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "messaged"

And then execute:

bundle

Or install it yourself as:

gem install messaged

Generate the needed migrations and initializer:

rails generate messaged:install
rails messaged:install:migrations

Importmap

If you do not yet have importmap-rails added to your application, be sure to add config/importmap.rb:

# config/importmap.rb
pin "application", preload: true
pin "@hotwired/turbo-rails", to: "turbo.min.js", preload: true

Usage

Messages broadcast to the DOM element id messages

<div id="messages"></div>

To get started with a basic HTML structure, run in your terminal: rails generate messaged:views

If you're using this engine or turbo-rails for the first time, it is recommended to generate the views to familiarize yourself with how turbo tags are used when turbo streaming.

Routes

If you're starting a fresh application, ensure your application has a root path.

# For example:
root to: "home#index"

Next, set up your ActionCable routes if you haven't already.

mount ActionCable.server => '/cable'

Lastly, mount the Messaged engine's paths.

mount Messaged::Engine => "/messaged"

Users

Messaged assumes you have a user model. You may customize the user model name in the initializer. For example, if your user model is called Member:

# config/initializers/messaged.rb
Messaged.user_class = 'Member'
Messaged.current_user_method = :current_member

Tenants

Messaged does not assume the application is multi-tenant, but does support it. By default, Messaged.tenant_class is set to nil.

# config/initializers/messaged.rb
Messaged.tenant_class = 'Account'
Messaged.current_tenant_method = :current_account

Dependencies

It is recommended, particularly for development, to have a websockets compatible web server. This is true for production as well, but puma adds an easy way to support websockets without needing additional infrastructure from external services.

gem "puma"

By default, Messaged is powered by:

gem "rails", ">= 7.0.2.3"
gem "importmap-rails", "1.1.5"
gem "turbo-rails", "1.3.0"

If your application cannot support these gems, it is recommended that you do not use the Messaged engine. Alternatively, feel free to work this engine and add support for your desired setup. Pull requests are welcome, see: CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License. See also: LICENSE.txt

Other Info

Messaged is intended to be named through the nomenclature used in Noticed, in part because Collin and I met through the GoRails Discord server (owned by @excid3). —Ian

TODO

• Complete adding rich_text support
• Complete multi-tenant support
• Create and finish the test suite via TestKit

TODO on bleeding pre-merge

• Add documentation about how to extend messages and rooms
  • If not for anyone else, do it for future you
• Add to docs about how it is up to the dev to determine how messages/rooms are authorized