HARDCHATS

About

HARDCHATS is a lightweight voice & video chat platform for small groups. It runs entirely through a self-hosted coturn TURN relay rather than direct peer-to-peer, so participants never expose their IPs to each other. There's an optional IRC sidebar that bridges into a regular IRC channel for text chat.

It's intentionally admin-less - there are no moderators, no roles, no kicks, no bans. The room is self-moderated by whoever's in it. To keep that workable, the client ships with a couple of safety levers:

Setup

NGINX setup

Create a certificate

sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d hardchats.com

Create an NGINX config

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/hardchats.com.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name dev.hardchats.com;

    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
    server_name dev.hardchats.com;

    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/hardchats.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/hardchats.com/privkey.pem;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:58080;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;

        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

sudo ln -sf /etc/nginx/sites-available/hardchats.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

UnrealIRCd setup

Create a listen block for websocket connections over TLS

listen {
    ip *;
    port 7000;
    options {
        tls;
        websocket { type text; }
    };
    tls-options {
        certificate "tls/irc.crt";
        key "tls/irc.key";
		options { no-client-certificate; }
    };
};

Note: The no-client-certificate is required to allow Chrome based browsers to connect. This is not required for Firefox though.

Load required modules

loadmodule "webserver";
loadmodule "websocket";
loadmodule "websocket_common";

Contribute

Come join us on irc.supernets.org in #hardchats for testing, feedback, & collaboration!

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Mirrors: acid.vegas • SuperNETs • GitHub • GitLab • Codeberg