Creating a Chat Application

Well alright! Let’s build our first Feathers app! We’re going to build a real-time chat app with NeDB as the database. It’s a great way to cover all the things that you’d need to do in a real world application and how Feathers can help. It also makes a lot more sense to have a real-time component than a Todo list.

In this tutorial, you go from nothing to a real-time chat app complete with signup, login, token based authentication and authorization all with a RESTful and real-time API. You can go through this guide right away, but we recommend you first get a basic understanding of Feathers in the basics guide.

You can find a complete working example here.

Creating the application

Create a new application using the generator.

Generating a service

Add an API endpoint to store messages.

Adding Authentication

Add user registration and login.

Processing data

Sanitize and process user data.

Building a frontend

Learn how to use Feathers in the browser by creating a small real-time chat frontend.

Writing tests

Write automated unit tests and add code coverage to our chat application.