ponyplace is a 2d pony chatroom powered by node.js and WebSocket.

Setup

Configuration

1. Make sure you have a special-users.json file in the server/data_config directory. Make sure the usernames listed have accounts attached, otherwise anyone can create one with that name and use mod powers. Should be of format:

    {
        "joe": "creator",
        "fred": "moderator",
        "garry": "moderator",
        "tomatobot": "bot"
    }
   

2. You'll also need a bypass.json file in server/data_config. You can leave it empty ({}), but if you have any bots, this allows them to bypass login via Persona, and instead use a password, e.g.:

    {
        "somebot": "password123"
    }
   

3. Finally, set up a config.json file in server/data_config, to specify the port listened on for debugging and production modes, and the origins needed. "allow_missing_origin", if true, allows clients to connect which don't provide an origin (i.e. non-web browser clients like bots). It doesn't really matter what you set this to, though, since if they can avoid providing an origin, they can also probably fake one. For example:

    {
        "origin": "http://pp.ajf.me",
        "origin_debug": "http://localhost:8000",
        "port": 8000,
        "port_debug": 8000,
        "allow_missing_origin": true
    }
   

Running Server

1. Obviously, make sure you have node.js.
2. cd into the server directory and do npm install. This is equivalent to npm install websocket to get WebSocket-Node (which itself requires node-gyp, do sudo npm install -g node-gyp first), npm install keypress to get the keypress module and npm install express to get express.
3. Make sure server/data_user is writeable.
4. Run server.js (add --debug switch if running locally)

ponyplace no longer requires a separate web server. To integrate as part of a site using vhosts, run ponyplace on a different port and reverse-proxy.