Flutter Chat App with Node.js, WebSockets and MySQL

A Flutter Chat App that supports live video and audio calls streaming with WebRTC, built with Node.js, MySQL, and WebSockets.

This is a Flutter Chat App without Firebase, but if it doesn’t fit for you, it can still be an example of a template to build your Flutter Chat UI

The Node.js server uses Askless for streaming data changes to the Flutter App through WebSockets, so the Flutter widgets are updated in realtime.

Because this project uses TypeORM, you can easily change the database to make this a Flutter Chat App with PostgreSQL, rather than with MySQL

The text messages are also saved in the user device with Hive, so the user doesn’t need to be connected to the internet to see his received messages.

commented_askless_example.mp4

^{🔊 The video above contains audio, click on the right side to turn it on}

Getting started

Go to nodejs_websocket_backend and install the dependencies by running npm install
The Node.js server uses TypeORM, TypeORM supports several databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAP Hana and WebSQL. So the first step is to configure the database of your choice. Add your database configuration on nodejs_websocket_backend/src/environment/db.ts, don’t commit this file to your repository
In nodejs_websocket_backend/src/environment/jwt-private.key, replace the JWT private key with your own random text, don’t also commit this file to your repository
Start your node.js backend server by running the command npm run dev, it will print its URL in the console (local network).
Go to the App created with Flutter on flutter_app/lib/core/data/data_sources/connection_remote_ds.dart and replace the serverUrl with the URL and port that your node.js backend is running
Go to flutter_app/lib/environment.dart and replace the localStorageEncryptionKey with your own random text. don’t commit this file to your repository as well.
Run flutter pub get to get the Flutter dependencies
Run the Flutter project on your device 🙂