How To: Using websockets in your plugin

psychobunny

Hey @Mr_Waffle would you like this guide to be a guest post on our blog? Maybe omit the initial bits and get straight to the solution etc.

Thanks for the guide

Schamper

@psychobunny said:

Hey @Mr_Waffle would you like this guide to be a guest post on our blog? Maybe omit the initial bits and get straight to the solution etc.

Thanks for the guide

Sure, go ahead

psychobunny

Thanks again http://blog.nodebb.org/using-websockets-in-your-plugin/

skaughtx0r

Thanks @Mr_Waffle !

I started implementing this method in my static page plugin. I actually saw it in your shoutbox code on github (and stole it ) before you wrote this how to.

Bri

I was just about to ask about this, thanks for the guide! Just to be thorough, maybe include how to send a message in the other direction, server to client? If plugin authors are starting to append to existing modules in the core, maybe we should establish some namespacing conventions?

psychobunny

Server can do socket.emit and client can listen to socket.on without too much extra work. Keep me up to date with what you're doing and I can lend you a hand if you run into any problems

Bri

Yeah, I know, I was able to figure that part out I was just saying for the sake of anyone starting out. It's not as straightforward as socket.io demonstrates...
@Mr_Waffle 's Shoutbox plugin was a good example of using something like

var socketIndex = module.parent.require('./socket.io/index');
socketIndex.server.sockets.emit('event:imgbed.server.rcv.end', { id: id, url: url, alt: alt} );

to send a message to the client, whereas simply using socket.emit('event:imgbed.server.rvc.end', { id: "this is the id" }); will crash the server.

Schamper

@BDHarrington7 said:

Yeah, I know, I was able to figure that part out I was just saying for the sake of anyone starting out. It's not as straightforward as socket.io demonstrates...
@Mr_Waffle 's Shoutbox plugin was a good example of using something like
var socketIndex = module.parent.require('./socket.io/index');
socketIndex.server.sockets.emit('event:imgbed.server.rcv.end', { id: id, url: url, alt: alt} );
to send a message to the client, whereas simply using socket.emit('event:imgbed.server.rvc.end', { id: "this is the id" }); will crash the server.

Ye this is a little bit tricky, but you can figure this out by looking at some of the core code, especially the chat and new topic/reply sockets. Because you can already figure this out by looking at core code, I didn't think it'd be that important to write a guide on that as well Creating your own sockets isn't something that you can figure out from looking at core code!

PitaJ

@Schamper lol dat NaN tho

Scuzz

@pitaj Where did you find this?