chatkitty

chatkitty-js

ChatKitty helps you build real-time chat without any back-end.

The example above was created with ChatKitty. Check it out at demo.chatkitty.com.

Features

• Private chat - Provide secure and encrypted direct messaging to your users.

• Group chat - Your users can request to join or be invited to group chats.

• Message threads - Keep conversations organized with message threads.

• Push notifications - Make sure your users always see their messages.

• File attachments - Attach images, videos, or any other type of files.

• Typing indicators - Let your users know when others are typing.

• Reactions - Users can react to messages with emojis and GIFs.

• Presence indicators - Let your users know who's online.

• Delivery and read receipts - See when messages get delivered and read.

• Link preview generation - Messages with links get rich media previews.

ChatKitty is the first complete chat platform; bringing together everything that's required to build real-time chat into Web and mobile apps. Getting started with ChatKitty is easy and you get:

Reliability

Your user chat sessions remain stable even in the presence of proxies, load balancers and personal firewalls. ChatKitty provides auto reconnection support and offline notifications so your users stay in the loop.

Low Latency

With response times below 100ms, ChatKitty makes sure your users have a smooth and immersive chat experience.

Cross-platform support

You can use ChatKitty across every major browser and device platform. ChatKitty also works great with multi-platform frameworks like React-Native and Ionic.

Simple and convenient API

Sample code:

const kitty = ChatKitty.getInstance(CHATKITTY_API_KEY);

useEffect(() => {
  // start real-time chat session
  let result = kitty.startChatSession({
    channel: channel,
    onReceivedMessage: (message) => {
      showMessage(message); // update your UI as new chat events occur
    },
  });

  return result.session.end;
}, []);

We've spent a lot of time thinking of the right abstractions and implementing our API to be straightforward and easy to use - making you more productive.

Installation

Install with NPM

npm install chatkitty

Install with Yarn

yarn add chatkitty

How to use

Getting an API key

You'll need a free ChatKitty account before you can begin building chat with ChatKitty. After creating your account, create a ChatKitty application using the dashboard and copy its API key from your application's setting page.

Initialize the SDK with your API key

With your API key you can initialize a new instance of the ChatKitty JS client:

const kitty = ChatKitty.getInstance(CHATKITTY_API_KEY);

Starting a user session

To make calls to ChatKitty as a user, a user session must be started.

You can start a user session using the unique username of a user and optional authentication parameters to secure the user session.

await kitty.startSession({
  username: email,
});

Starting a chat session

Before a user can begin sending and receiving real-time messages and use in-app chat features like typing indicators, delivery and read receipts, emoji and like reactions, etc, you'll need to start a chat session.

kitty.startChatSession({
  channel: channel,
  onReceivedMessage: (message) => {
    // handle received messages
  },
  onReceivedKeystrokes: (keystrokes) => {
    // handle received typing keystrokes
  },
  onTypingStarted: (user) => {
    // handle user starts typing
  },
  onTypingStopped: (user) => {
    // handle user stops typing
  },
  onParticipantEnteredChat: (user) => {
    // handle user who just entered the chat
  },
  onParticipantLeftChat: (user) => {
    // handle user who just left the chat
  },
  onParticipantPresenceChanged: (user) => {
    // handle user who became online, offline, do not distrub, invisible
  },
});

All handler methods are optional, so you only needed to register handlers for chat events your application cares about.

Chat session event handler methods

Name	Parameter Type	Description
onReceivedMessage	Message	Called when a message is sent to this channel.
onReceivedKeystrokes	Keystrokes	Called when typing keystrokes are made by users actively chatting in this channel.
onTypingStarted	User	Called when a user starts typing in this channel.
onTypingStopped	User	Called when a user stops typing in this channel.
onParticipantEnteredChat	User	Called when another user starts an active chat session in this channel.
onParticipantLeftChat	User	Called when another user ends their active chat session in this channel.
onParticipantPresenceChanged	User	Called when a member of this channel changes their presence status or goes online or offline.

API Documentation

Please see the documentation for this SDK at the ChatKitty Website.

The source code of the website can be found here. Contributions are welcomed!

A complete SDK reference document is hosted at https://chatkitty.github.io/chatkitty-js/

Questions? Need Help? Found a bug?

If you've got questions about setup, usage, special feature implementation in your chat app, or just want to chat with a ChatKitty dev, please feel free to start a thread in our Discussions tab!

Found a bug with ChatKitty? Go ahead and submit an issue. And, of course, feel free to submit pull requests with bug fixes or changes.

Contributing

We welcome code changes that improve this library or fix a problem, please make sure to follow all best practices and add tests if applicable before submitting a Pull Request. We are very happy to merge your code.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Acknowledgements

• axios
• RxJS
• RxStomp
• text-encoding