Create a Chat App with Rails 5, ActionCable, and Devise

Rails 5 has introduced a bunch of new great features, but one of the most anticipated ones is of course ActionCable. ActionCable seamlessly integrates WebSockets into your application and offers both client-side JS and server-side Ruby frameworks. This way, you can write real-time features in the same styles as the rest your application, which is really cool.

Some months ago I wrote a series of articles describing how to build mini-chat with Rails using AJAX, WebSockets powered by Faye and Server-sent events. Those articles garnered some attention, so I decided to pen a new part of this series instructing how to use ActionCable to achieve the same goal.

This time, however, we will face a bit more complicated task and discuss the following topics:

• Preparing application and integrating Devise
• Introducing chat rooms
• Setting up ActionCable
• Coding client-side
• Coding server-side with the help of background jobs
• Introducing basic authorization for ActionCable
• Preparing application to be deployed to Heroku

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by Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski via SitePoint