Broadsocket

broadcast websocket messages to every client

screenshot

About

Broadsocket is a websocket testing server, where every message is broadcasted to all connected clients. This is useful if you want to write a service that depends on a websocket server that does not yet exists.

Message broadcasts can be scoped in topics, i.e. only clients connected to the same topic will receive messages from another.

Features

Simple web-based UI
Scoping messages into topics
Single-file, zero-dependency executable
Ephemeral messaging, no database

Installation

Golang CLI

Broadsocket can be installed using go install:

$ go install github.com/bliepp/broadsocket@latest
$

Make sure your $PATH environment variable includes your $GOBIN path (by default it is ~/go/bin).

Usage

Broadsocket is written to work as a single executable with no runtime dependencies. Simply run it and optionally specifiy the bind address:

$ broadsocket [-b <host>:<port>]
$

By default Broadsocket is served at localhost:8888.

The websockets are now available at localhost:8888/.ws/<topic>. To read and send messages via a basic UI simply discard the .ws part of the URL (localhost:8888/<topic>). The topic can basically be any path appended to the root path (everything after # and ? is ignored because of the way URLs work). New topics are automatically created when they are first called and automatically deleted if there are no clients connected anymore.

Building

First, clone the repository and enter the it:

$ git clone https://github.com/bliepp/broadsocket.git
$ cd broadsocket
$

For production

Simply run

$ go build .
$

You should find an executable called broadsocket in the project's directory (broadsocket.exeon windows). You can directly execute it using ./broadsocket or add it to your $PATH variable.

If you need a true zero-dependency build, make sure to disable CGO:

$ CGO_ENABLED=0 go build .
$

For development

When you want to modify the source code of broadsocket I'd recommend cosmtrek's air. With that, simply run:

$ air

  __    _   ___  
 / /\  | | | |_) 
/_/--\ |_| |_| \_ v1.51.0, built with Go go1.22.0

watching .
watching broadcast
!exclude tmp
building...
running...
2024/05/14 09:05:53 Starting server at localhost:8888

FAQ

Is Broadsocket production ready?

Kind of. Broadsocket is designed for my websocket testing needs. There's no such thing as production in this scenario.

So, are there any bugs?

Not as I know of, but I might be wrong. Feel free to open an issue or pull request when you encounter one.

Can I use Broadsocket as a backend for my chat app?

You could, but probably shouldn't. In fact, the basic UI can be thought of some kind of chatting app, but in reality it misses some features and cannot be considered secure. There's no encryption, very little error handling, etc, so I highly advice against it. For temporarily transfering data it might be okay, I guess.

Where is my data stored?

The data is ephemeral (i.e. stored in-memory). Your messages are not stored in some database or so.

Is there a public instance? I don't want do all the steps above just to quickly try out websocket connections!

Unfortunately, as of now there's no public instance available.

# README