Building a Real-time Chat Application
Develop a simple real-time chat application demonstrating WebSocket capabilities in FastAPI.
Real-time Chat App Overview
Welcome to building your very own real-time chat application! This lesson brings together everything we've learned about WebSockets in FastAPI.
- We'll create a FastAPI server that manages multiple chat connections.
- Clients will connect via WebSockets to send and receive messages instantly.
- You'll see both the server-side (FastAPI) and a simple client-side (HTML/JavaScript) implementation.
Get ready to see real-time communication in action!
Managing Chat Connections
For a chat application, our server needs to keep track of all active WebSocket connections. When a user sends a message, the server will broadcast it to everyone else.
We'll use a simple ConnectionManager class to handle adding, removing, and broadcasting messages to connected clients.
from typing import List
from fastapi import WebSocket
class ConnectionManager:
def __init__(self):
self.active_connections: List[WebSocket] = []
async def connect(self, websocket: WebSocket):
await websocket.accept()
self.active_connections.append(websocket)
def disconnect(self, websocket: WebSocket):
self.active_connections.remove(websocket)
async def send_personal_message(self, message: str, websocket: WebSocket):
await websocket.send_text(message)
async def broadcast(self, message: str):
for connection in self.active_connections:
await connection.send_text(message)All lessons in this course
- WebSocket Protocol Fundamentals
- Implementing WebSockets in FastAPI
- Building a Real-time Chat Application
- Scaling WebSockets with a Pub/Sub Backplane