Nightwatch

The chatting application to end all chatting applications.

Installation

Note

If you want a Nightwatch experience that "just works", check the release branch.

As an end-user, you have multiple clients to pick from when it comes to accessing Nightwatch.
Here are two of the standard clients for you to choose from:

• Terminal Client (based on urwid)

  • Installation is as simple as pip install nightwatch-chat.
  • The client can be started by running nightwatch in your terminal.

• Full Desktop App (based on tauri)

  • Download the latest release for your system from here.
  • Alternatively, run it manually:
    • Follow the instructions from Tauri prerequisites.
    • Install the Tauri CLI with cd nightwatch/desktop && bun i.
    • Launch via bun run tauri dev.

Server Installation

Running a Nightwatch server is a piece of cake:

# Make a virtual environment for Nightwatch
uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install the server and its dependencies
uv pip install nightwatch-chat[serve]

# Edit the configuration
mkdir -p ~/.config/nightwatch
nano ~/.config/nightwatch/config.json

# Launch the server
python3 -m nightwatch.server

Configuration

Configuration is available at:

• *nix systems: ~/.config/nightwatch/config.json
• Windows: %AppData%\Local\Nightwatch\config.json

An example config with all available options is as follows:

{
    "server": {
        "connections": {
            "redis": {
                "address": "redis.example.com",

                // Password is optional
                "password": "somerandompassword"
            },
            "mongodb": "mongodb://user:[email protected]"
        },

        // Icon URL for your server
        // To be replaced by a self hosted icon in the future
        "icon_url": "https://example.com/images/icon.png",

        // If your auth server is auth.example.com and you want
        // IDs to use example.com instead, specify that here.
        // example.com/.well-known/nightwatch will need to return
        // auth.example.com for this to be accepted by servers.
        "domain": "example.com"
    },
    "client": {
        "username": "iiPythonx",
        "user_color": "#126bf1",
        "servers": [
            "localhost:8000",
            "nightwatch.example.com"
        ]
    }
}