This is a project by Heinrich Grattenthaler, Filip Jaksic, Jannis Widmer and Fabian Landwehr. It is an online group chat application with a visual easy-to-use interface. We built this prototype as part of the course Human Computer Interaction at ETH Zürich.
The live demo can be opened at groupchat.ch.
To learn more about this project, you can visit our development blog.
You can also watch the trailer video on YouTube.
We have to run multiple processes at the same time. To do that, we can use tmux. We first create two new tmux sessions:
$ tmux new -s node-server
$ tmux new -s peerjs-server
To attach a session, type
$ tmux attach -t SESSIONNAME
To detach from a session, type ctrl-b d.
This application was built with nodejs v10.23.0. Make sure you have a similar version installed.
To start the nodejs server, attach to the tmux session:
tmux attach -t node-server
Then to actually start it, type
$ sudo node server.js
After that you can detach with ctrl-b d.
To install the peerjs server globally, type the following into the console:
$ npm i peer -g
After doing that, you should be able to start the peerjs server. It is important that the certificates are properly set up. If they are not, the connection to the peerjs server will silently fail.
Attach to the peer-js tmux session, then type:
$ peerjs --port 9000 --key peerjs --sslkey private.key --sslcert certificate.crt --path /hci_app --sslca ca_bundle.crt
After that, again detach from the tmux session.