Month: January 2019

Often, I need a simple real-time server and web interface that shows real-time events. Although there are many options available like socket.io for Node.js or services like Azure SignalR and PubNub, I decided to create a real-time server in Go with a simple web front-end:

For a real-time server in Go, there are several options. You could use Gorilla WebSocket of which there is an excellent tutorial, and use native WebSockets in the browser. There’s also Glue. However, if you want to use the socket.io client, you can use https://github.com/googollee/go-socket.io. It is an implementation, although not a complete one, of socket.io. For production scenarios, I recommend using socket.io with Node.js because it is heavily used, has more features, better documentation, etc…

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the code. Some things to note in advance:

• the code uses the concept of rooms (as in a chat room); clients can join a room and only see messages for that room; you can use that concept to create a “room” for a device and only subscribe to messages for that device
• the code use the excellent https://github.com/mholt/certmagic to enable https via a Let’s Encrypt certificate (DNS-01 verification)
• the code uses Redis as the back-end; applications send messages to Redis via a PubSub channel; the real-time Go server checks for messages via a subscription to one or more Redis channels

The code is over at https://github.com/gbaeke/realtime-go.

Server

Let’s start with the imports. Naturally we need Redis support, the actual go-socket.io packages and certmagic. The cloudflare package is needed because my domain baeke.info is managed by CloudFlare. The package gives certmagic the ability to create the verification record that Let’s Encrypt will check before issuing the certificate:

import (
 "log"
 "net/http"
 "os"

 "github.com/go-redis/redis"
 socketio "github.com/googollee/go-socket.io"
 "github.com/mholt/certmagic"
 "github.com/xenolf/lego/providers/dns/cloudflare"
) 

Next, the code checks if the RTHOST environment variable is set. RTHOST should contain the hostname you request the certificate for (e.g. rt.baeke.info).

Let’s check the block of code that sets up the Redis connection.

// redis connection
client := redis.NewClient(&redis.Options{
 Addr: getEnv("REDISHOST", "localhost:6379"),
})

// subscribe to all channels
pubsub := client.PSubscribe("*")
_, err := pubsub.Receive()
if err != nil {
 panic(err)
}

// messages received on a Go channel
ch := pubsub.Channel() 

First, we create a new Redis client. We either use the address in the REDISHOST environment variable or default to localhost:6379. I will later run this server on Azure Container Instances (ACI) in a multi-container setup that also includes Redis.

With the call to PSubscribe, a pattern subscribe is used to subscribe to all PubSub channels (*). If the subscribe succeeds, a Go channel is setup to actually receive messages on.

Now that the Redis connection is configured, let’s turn to socket.io:

server, err := socketio.NewServer(nil)
if err != nil {
 log.Fatal(err)
}

server.On("connection", func(so socketio.Socket) {
 log.Printf("New connection from %s ", so.Id())

 so.On("channel", func(channel string) {
  log.Printf("%s joins channel %s\n", so.Id(), channel)
  so.Join(channel)
 })

 so.On("disconnection", func() {
  log.Printf("disconnect from %s\n", so.Id())
 })
})

The above code is pretty simple. We create a new socket.io server and subsequently setup event handlers for the following events:

• connection: code that runs when a web client connects; gives us the socket the client connects on which is further used by the channel and disconnection handler
• channel: this handler runs when a client sends a message of the chosen type channel; the channel contains the name of the socket.io room to join; this is used by the client to indicate what messages to show (e.g. just for device01); in the browser, the client sends a channel message that contains the text “device01”
• disconnection: code to run when the client disconnects from the socket

Naturally, something crucial is missing. We need to check Redis for messages in Redis channels and broadcast them to matching socket.io “channels”. This is done in a Go routine that runs concurrently with the main code:

 go func(srv *socketio.Server) {
   for msg := range ch {
      log.Println(msg.Channel, msg.Payload)
      srv.BroadcastTo(msg.Channel, "message", msg.Payload)
   }
 }(server) 

The anonymous function accepts a parameter of type socketio.Server. We use the BroadcastTo method of socketio.Server to broadcast messages arriving on the Redis PubSub channels to matching socket.io channels. Note that we send a message of type “message” so the client will have to check for “message” coming in as well. Below is a snippet of client-side code that does that. It adds messages to the messages array defined on the Vue.js app:

socket.on('message', function(msg){
    app.messages.push(msg)
}

The rest of the server code basically configures certmagic to request the Let’s Encrypt certificate and sets up the http handlers for the static web client and the socket.io server:

// certificate magic
certmagic.Agreed = true
certmagic.CA = certmagic.LetsEncryptStagingCA

cloudflare, err := cloudflare.NewDNSProvider()
if err != nil {
 log.Fatal(err)
}

certmagic.DNSProvider = cloudflare

mux := http.NewServeMux()
mux.Handle("/socket.io/", server)
mux.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("./assets")))

certmagic.HTTPS([]string{rthost}, mux) 

Let’s try it out! The GitHub repository contains a file called multi.yaml, which deploys both the socket.io server and Redis to Azure Container Instances. The following images are used:

• gbaeke/realtime-go-le: built with this Dockerfile; the image has a size of merely 14MB
• redis: the official Redis image

To make it work, you will need to update the environment variables in multi.yaml with the domain name and your CloudFlare credentials. If you do not use CloudFlare, you can use one of the other providers. If you want to use the Let’s Encrypt production CA, you will have to change the code, rebuild the container, store it in your registry and modify multi.yaml accordingly.

In Azure Container Instances, the following is shown:

To test the setup, I can send a message with redis-cli, from a console to the realtime-redis container:

You should be aware that using CertMagic with ephemeral storage is NOT a good idea due to potential Let’s Encrypt rate limiting. You should store the requested certificates in persistent storage like an Azure File Share and mount it at /.local/share/certmagic!

Client

The client is a Vue.js app. It was not created with the Vue cli so it just grabs the Vue.js library from the content delivery network (CDN) and has all logic in a single page. The socket.io library (v1.3.7) is also pulled from the CDN. The socket.io client code is kept at a minimum for demonstration purposes:

 var socket = io();
 socket.emit('channel','device01');
 socket.on('message', function(msg){
     app.messages.push(msg)
}) 

When the page loads, the client emits a channel message to the server with a payload of device01. As you have seen in the server section, the server reacts to this message by joining this client to a socket.io room, in this case with name device01.

Whenever the client receives a message from the server, it adds the message to the messages array which is bound to a list item (li) with a v-for directive.

Surprisingly easy no? With a few lines of code you have a fully functional real-time messaging solution!