This application shows how to use Firebase to build an effective prototype demonstrating the following features.

• Allows anonymous use - but can upgrade to an email-identified account.
• Users can create public or private chat rooms.
• Room owners can make rooms:
  • Public (or private) readable.
  • Publicly joinable or invite-only.
  • Allow owner or member controlled invitiations.

You should have these tools installed on your machine and be familiar with use the Bash command line (installing on Windows).

• Git.
• Node.js and the npm package manager.

Open a command-line/Terminal window and download this repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/mckoss/group-chat.git
$ cd group-chat

In order to keep this app as simple as possible, it is built as a collection of simple single-page applications w/o the use of any JavaScript frameworks.

$ source tools/use
$ configure-project
$ build-project

Make sure firebase is setup correctly:

$ firebase --version
3.5.0

• Go to firebase.google.com.
• Click SIGN IN button and use a Google Account to sign in.
• Go to the Firebase Console.
• Click CREATE NEW PROJECT. Use a project name like 'koss-group-chat' (prefix with a username to avoid collisions with other developers).
• Enable Anonymous, Email/Password, and Google sign-in methods.

Each application has it's own configuration information to use Firebase; follow these steps to use your own instead of the example configuration.

• Click Add Firebase to your web app from the Overview page.
• Copy the Javascript lines to the file in app/config.js (don't copy the <script> tags).

Verify your newly created app is listed from the command line:

$ firebase list

Make it the default app to deploy to (replace your own app name below):

$ firebase use --add koss-group-chat

Now deploy it and view it on the web:

$ firebase deploy

Visit the hosting URL as display by the deploy command (looks like https://koss-group-chat.firebaseapp.com).