BJUTChat

A simple & experimental chat application tailored for university uses, mainly Python-based, with Curve25519 encryption support.

Project is no longer maintained, and you are free to clone & modify in compliance to the license.

Features

• Register / Login
• Manage friends (request, remove)
• Manage Groups (join, create)
• Group User Privilige (group user, admin, creator; invite / kick / set admin)
• Change Username
• Messages (receive / send raw text, image, files)
• Admin portal for management

Structure

• /admin_dashboard is a admin dashboard (Python + Flask)
  • Note it have no WSGI support and could only be run with the flask dev server
• /client is client code. (Python + tKinter)
• /file_server is file server. (Python + Flask)
• /server is chat server. (Python)

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• Windows 10+, Any Linux, macOS 10.11+
• Anything stringer than a potato

Deployment

Follow the steps below:

• Deploy file_server
• Deploy server. Before starting, set server port in config.json.
• Fill up the config json with client related info in config.json before you compile.
• Build client
• (optional) Start up admin dashboard

Building Client

This app can be bundled with PyInstaller. It is advised to create a new env to build this, otherwise the installer will be unnecessarily huge.

Note: server options (config.json) should be tweaked before building.

Dependencies outside Python packages

• tkinter

Examples

An example using conda's env feature:

conda create -n univchat_build python=3.12
conda activate univchat_build
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
pyinstaller run_client.spec

With python3 native venv, on bash:

python3 -m venv bjutchat_env
source bjutchat_enc/bin/activate
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
pyinstaller run_client.spec

Running File Server

With python3 native venv, on bash:

python3 -m venv bjutchat_env # Watch out for dependencies!
source bjutchat_env/bin/activate
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
pip install -r ./requirements_extra.txt
python3 ./file_server/init_db.py # Initializes & cleans database
python3 ./run_file_server.py

Running Chat Server

With python3 native venv, on bash:

python3 -m venv bjutchat_env
source bjutchat_env/bin/activate
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
pip install -r ./requirements_extra.txt
python3 ./server/excute_sql.py # Initializes & cleans database
python3 ./run_server.py

Running dashboard

Must perform after starting chat server. Not safe, dont use unless required.

python3 ./run_dashboard.py

Acknowledgement

This project is based on and would not be possible without Uchat.