Distributed chat on Go using gRPC and Protocol Buffers as a method of communication between nodes. The Hirschberg-Sinclair algorithm based on two-way ring topology was used as the leader election algorithm. This work was done as part of a semester project on Distributed Systems and Computing. The main purpose of the work was to learn about distributed algorithms.

Also for me personally it was interesting to get acquainted with Go, gRPC and Protocol Buffers. The project is not perfect and does not include handling all sorts of edge cases, but it should work in most cases.

It is worth mentioning that within the semester project the main task was precisely the implementation of the Hirschberg-Sinclair leader election algorithm.

sudo apt install protobuf-compiler

sudo apt install golang-go

go get -u google.golang.org/grpc
go get -u github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go

protoc -I=./proto --go_out=./proto --go_opt=paths=source_relative --go-grpc_out=require_unimplemented_servers=false:./proto --go-grpc_opt=paths=source_relative ./proto/*.proto

go run .

or

go build -o chat

The mDNS protocol is used to search for services. The mDNS package from HashiCorp is used as a Discovery Service.

Default path for logs is /var/log/dchat. If /var/log/ doesn't exist, logs will be saved in the folder ./logs of the project root. In this folder you can find logs for the entire app and for the chat messages.