Awesome stuff @hhaidar! I'm sure a bunch of people will love the fact that logs and data exist on their servers. I'm sure it'll resolve some privacy/internal regulation concerns.

Also, hi from Toronto! I work out of CSI at Bloor + Bathurst. Nice to see another Torontonian on here :)

migrootions? :-)

Very nice work! And thanks so much for making it open source. Our company is always looking for an open-source solution that would let us move off of Hangouts, and this might just be the vehicle for that someday. XMPP, chat history, @mentions, local hosting, and open source...a great combo.

The only major thing that's missing that we'd need is private chat! Hope to see that as a feature someday.

Thanks!

Private is pretty much first on our list for the next release. We use hangouts as well and it's definitely a pain point to juggle multiple apps.

Will you be using WebRTC for the chat interface?

I literally just came from the Slack site to HN wondering if there was an opensource/selfhosting version of something like Slack. Well I guess that question is answered.

There is also Kandan App. https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan

Is Kandan still actively developed? Doesn't seem like there's been anything new for a couple of years.

Yep, we still are! I recently got added to the ownership team for Kandan (https://github.com/orgs/kandanapp/people) and I've been trying to respond to every issue / pull request that's been submitted. If there's a feature you are missing, let me know. Our last commit was 22 days ago, and we've added a ton of bug fixes, optimizations, security fixes, and overall tweaks in the past few years. Check us out!

Recently, the thing I've been focusing on lately with the app is bug fixes, small tweaks, and upgrading Rails. There's a lot of feature requests on the backburner, but I want the app to be extremely stable before going a mile wide and an inch deep.

That being said, "Let's Chat" looks like it is a great approach and I look forward to the progress that comes on it. The more open source solutions, the better.

eggbrain,

I really like Kanban and I am sad to see it isn't up to rails 4.2 yet. Are you looking for more contributors?

If so, how could I contact you to resolve a few questions so I can get the current repo up and running to work on?

There is also `ncat` http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/13460/simple-mult...

(I'll see myself to the door.)

I was about to say "come on, nothing beats IRC", but then I remembered how I always wanted IRC to have LDAP, XMPP, and a REST API.

So... can I connect with my IRC client?

I want it the other way - let's clone all those shiny features and make a pretty, nongeek-friendly client. IRC protocol can be extended to handle all that stuff.

I just deployed to Heroku with the button and the home page gives me a "Moved temporarily". Later a 503 application error.

Something similar https://github.com/JabbR/JabbR

This is really great. Two big missing features preventing us from switching away from Slack are direct messages and mobile push notifications. The latter is hard to do: push is highly centralized, which is really bad for self-hosted/open source software. But DMs are totally doable.

The latter is hard to do: push is highly centralized, which is really bad for self-hosted/open source software

Why is this the case? I would have thought it's the same in principle whether it's a central Slack server, or a central FooMumble server running Let's Chat.

(Difficulty of implementation might be high, but that doesn't seem to be what you're talking about?)

There are basically two options and they both suck. Either publish one app and distribute the push notification cert (terrible idea) or each hosted site needs it's own cert and thus an Apple account/published app (pain in the ass).

Neat. What's the purpose of the "slug" when creating the room? I was expecting it to be the URL slug, such as http://localhost:5000/#!/room/my-room (and quickly noticed hyphens in the slug name caused a validation error...).

This looks great. Thanks for making it open-source. I've tried other self-hosted chat apps, but this one looks promising. IRC integration would be great. :)

When I was experimenting with websockets, I wanted to make a simple chat app that integrates with Github projects. Of course, not nearly as feature rich, but just an experiment to learn.

Source with demo: https://github.com/alfg/chathub-client

For github projects, I've been using http://gitter.im I've found the integration to be awesome and well thought-out.

Oh, definitely. Gitter has been great as a hosted solution!

Indeed very interesting open-source application! I agree IRC integration would be really nice, it's one of my favourite features on Slack, allowing me to communicate with my team mates without changing context when i'm inside a server context.

I wrote a simple how-to to do it for Slack and would be delighted to contribute on this feature for Let's chat!

http://www.pilgrimbreak.com/how-to-access-slack-with-command...

Any plans for search functionality?

This looks amazing - I recently had to add chat functionality to a web service (self-hosted) and was very much surprised at the crappy options out there. I ended up going with converse.js but the django support was lacking and the whole thing took a lot longer than i thought it was going to take (but then again , it always does)

I might test this out and actually swap them out if it works well.

Damn, I can't tell you how awesome this makes me feel.

Is your service open source or public?

S/he was talking about adding chat to one of his/her sites(or customer's sites) using conversejs[0] which is indeed opensource.

[0]-https://conversejs.org/

You guys should mention MIT license in the title, I didn't click earlier today because I thought it was a paid hosted solution.

(Nothing against paid, I'm just browsing as tinkering me atm : )

And, yes, I really liked the text, specially "A real live 10% time project!"

This is so so awesome!

Damn. What's wrong with Hacker News today? Everyone is being amazing!

Hah! No for real! Iove this, while ago I worked on something similar based on Rails for a startup, but I left it half way through.

Any plans to provide updates and take it to the next step?

Our actual job is working on SD Elements (http://securitycompass.com/sdelements/). Let's Chat is just a side project, but it's also something we use internally everyday. The features you wish were there we also wish were there, no doubt. Lots of the developers here like working on it. I expect there will be updates from us for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we'll start getting more external pull requests as well.

I doubt we are going to pivot to a free chat client company any time soon.

Is there a way to change user avatars? The screenshot has them but I can't find it in 0.3.2.

BTW the wiki page for Docker references release/0.3.0, but you don't have that branch naming prefix (release/).

I think they are using Gravatar (https://en.gravatar.com/) to pull them in based on your email as it surprised me for a second when I set it up locally, registered and then my current profile photo was already there.

Whoops, I forgot to answer your first question. But yes, we are using Gravatar.

Ah, I assume the reason we all get identical avatars is that gravatar api access gets stopped by the corporate proxy. Any chance that's easily configurable? You're probably going to see a lot of corporate use by places who insist on self hosting everything so you might want to consider dealing with avatars yourself.

I think you guys should change the behaviour regarding the focus of the text box. If I start typing in the chat window, and my cursor didn't activate the text box, it doesn't type.

Basically an open-source version of Slack. Nice work! https://slack.com/

I've reviewed the code of this project here: http://hackhat.com/p/130/lets-chat-analysis/

Topics:

     - Code organization;
     - Deployment;
     - Migrootions (mongoose migrations);
     - Templates;
     - Module loader;
     - CSS;

You are, perhaps, somewhat overusing various graphical effects on that page. Consider toning it down.

At least for me, reading it was too annoying so I stopped. I realize this makes me superficial but I prefer my reading material to STAND STILL so I can look at it. I feel so old.

This is really some great piece of software