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This tutorial requires advanced knowledge. We recommend you get professionals to do this if you are not at an advanced level.

Requires: phpFox version >= 4.5.2

The IM app requires NodeJS and Redis. In this article, we will go over how to setup NodeJS and Redis on the Linux Flavor, Ubuntu. We recommend that you separate your NodeJS, Redis and HTTP server from each other. Your HTTP server is the main web server that has your phpFox source code.

Hosting Services

There are cloud-based services where you can host your NodeJS code and Redis database without having to setup anything on a server.

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If you decide to setup NodeJS and Redis on your own web environments, lets first setup let's first set up NodeJS.

Node JS

Connect to your NodeJS server via SSH and run the command

sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
sudo apt-get install npm

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Via SSH navigate to the folder you just uploaded. You use the CD command to do this. Example:

cd /some/folder

Once you reached your NodeJS script you need to install all the libraries required to run the script.

npm update
npm install

Next, rename the sample config file.

mv config.js.new config.js

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• chat_server_key: server key, remember it to configure in ACP
• redis: information of your Redis server: host, port, and password

module.exports = {
    port: 3000,
    chat_server_key: "your-chat-server-key",
    secure: false, // use ssl ?
    privateKey: "./private_key.key", // path to private key ?
    cert: "./cert.crt",  // path to cert key ?
    redis: {
        host: '127.0.0.1',
        port: 6379,
        password: ''
    }
};

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Next, we need to install Redis.

sudo apt-get install redis-server

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Please skip this step if your phpFox site doesn't support SSL.
It requires your Chat supports SSL also if you want to use IM app on a an SSL site. So, make sure that you have enabled SSL before doing below step:
Open the file config.js, set true for a secure property, you also need to provide the path of private key file and cert key file, an example for of the change:

module.exports = {
    port: 3000,
    chat_server_key: "your-chat-server-key",
    secure: false, // use ssl ?
    privateKey: "./private_key.key", // path to private key ?
    cert: "./cert.crt",  // path to cert key ?
    redis: {
        host: '127.0.0.1',
        port: 6379
    }
};

Note: In case you are using Nginx server, you can add below configurations to your server instead of updating file config.js as above. Don't forget to update the path for your certificate and private key files. (For many distributions, the file will be located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. If it does not exist there, it may also be at /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf or /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf)

# your SSL configuration
#ssl on;
#ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl_cert.crt;
#ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl_private_key.key;

location /socket.io/ {
    # switch off logging
    access_log off;

    # redirect all HTTP traffic to 127.0.0.1:3000
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    # WebSocket support (nginx 1.4)
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}

Congratulation! Chat server has been set up completely, run below command to start it:

node index.js

Enabling from AdminCP

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