A basic chat implementation using Flask-Sockets

Setup the environment (if you don't have virtualenv installed, install it):

virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Flask Chat uses Redis as a PubSub to facilitate chat and as a datastore to retain old chats. Do not use Redis if the longterm retension of the chats is important as Redis is designed to eject data as needed without warning. Alternatives like RabbitMQ can replace both functionalities that Redis is used for, and provide a bit more robust data retension, or the datastore portion can be replaced independently to a more traditional datastore such as a relational database or NoSQL database.

If you don't have redis, it can be installed on OS X with:

brew install redis

brew will present a few different ways to start redis. If you with not to have redis launch at startup, you can start it ondemand with:

redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

Configure to work the application by adding the following to app/config/local_config.yml

REDIS_URL: 'redis://localhost'

Start the server with:

gunicorn -k flask_sockets.worker server:app -b 127.0.0.1:4999 --debug

and visit http://localhost:4999. Open in multiple browsers to observer the action with multiple users.