// the find
OmarElgabry/chat.io
A Real Time Chat Application built using Node.js, Express, Mongoose, Socket.io, Passport, & Redis.
A teaching project from 2016 that wires together the standard Node.js real-time chat stack: Express, Socket.io, Passport (local + Facebook/Twitter OAuth), MongoDB for persistence, and Redis as the Socket.io adapter for horizontal scaling. It's aimed at developers learning how these pieces fit together, not at production use.
The Redis-backed Socket.io adapter is the right call — most tutorials skip this and leave you with a broken multi-instance setup. Passport integration covers both local and social auth in one repo, which is useful as a reference. Session storage in MongoDB (connect-mongo) rather than in-memory is also a sensible default that beginners often get wrong. The code is small enough to read in an afternoon.
Abandoned since 2019 — bcrypt-nodejs is deprecated and unmaintained, versioneye.com is dead, and mLab was shut down by MongoDB Inc. in 2020, so the demo is gone and the setup docs reference a service that no longer exists. There are no tests at all. The config is stored in a committed JSON file with placeholder credentials, which is a bad habit to teach. This is a snapshot of 2016 Node.js conventions, not something you'd want to base new work on.