chatbot

A minimal Flask + Socket.IO real-time group chat server with registration, login and an admin page.

The name is misleading. There is no bot, no NLP and no AI in this repository. "Chatbot" is only the UI title; the app is a human-to-human chat room. Every message is broadcast to all connected clients — there is no automated reply of any kind.

This is the smallest and cleanest of three near-identical copies of the same project on this account. The other two are chatapp (adds a README and a static export attempt) and chatbotapp.github.io (adds Alembic migrations). Consider keeping one and archiving the others.

What it does

app.py (~145 lines) is the whole application:

• / — landing page
• /register — create an account; password hashed with bcrypt; every new user gets the role User
• /login, /logout — Flask-Login sessions
• /chat — the chat room (login required)
• /admin — lists all users and all chat history; gated by a role_required('Admin') decorator

Socket.IO: the client emits send_message; the server stores the message in the chathistory table and re-emits receive_message to every connected client (broadcast=True). One global room; no private messages, no rooms, no typing indicators, no online-user list, no message history replay on page load.

Tech stack

Python 3, Flask, Flask-SocketIO, Flask-SQLAlchemy, Flask-Login, Flask-Bcrypt, Flask-Migrate, psycopg2 (PostgreSQL), Bootstrap 5 and the Socket.IO 4.0 client from a CDN.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/Haroldke13/chatbot.git
cd chatbot
python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

requirements.txt is unpinned and does not list eventlet or gevent, which Flask-SocketIO normally needs for a production async worker. You may need pip install eventlet as well.

PostgreSQL is required

app.py hardcodes:

app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'postgresql://postgres:password@localhost/chatbot_db'

Create a chatbot_db database and either match those credentials or edit the line. Tables are created automatically at startup by db.create_all().

Run

python app.py      # starts socketio.run(app, debug=True) on http://127.0.0.1:5000

The Procfile (web: python app.py) targets a PaaS such as Heroku or Render, but running the Werkzeug dev server in production is not recommended.

Known issues

• app.py defines User and ChatHistory twice — once by importing them from user.py/db.py, then again as local classes that shadow the imports. user.py and db.py are effectively dead code.
• db = SQLAlchemy() is reassigned after from user import db, so the two module-level db objects diverge. It works because everything the app uses is defined after the reassignment, but it is fragile.
• app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = 'your_secret_key' — a placeholder. Set a real one before deploying.
• The hardcoded PostgreSQL URI embeds the literal password password. That is a placeholder rather than a real credential, but it should still come from an environment variable.
• The role_required decorator runs before @login_required resolves in some orderings and would raise on an anonymous user; /admin happens to stack them safely, but the decorator is not robust.

Status

Working prototype. Last commit December 2024. Registration, login, broadcast chat and the admin view all work against a local PostgreSQL instance. No tests and no .gitignore.

Licence

Proprietary software — all rights reserved. Copyright © 2026 Joel Harold Onyango.

This repository is not open source. The full terms are in LICENSE; in summary, you may not copy, redistribute, modify, sublicense, publish, re-host or commercially exploit this software, in whole or in part, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Access to this repository does not grant any licence beyond reading it.