Creating private rooms

It can often be useful to provide privacy for certain rooms. This allows you to send messages to a small group of sockets without worrying about the messages being received by sockets that should not be allowed to see them.

Although Socket.IO doesn't have any inbuilt way to consider a room private or public, we can add some logic around joining a room so that only sockets that validate against a password check are allowed to be members of the room.

In this recipe, we will create a simple login page. Sockets can log in with the static password: pass123, but we could easily make it use a dynamic password that comes from our database or an environmental variable. When the socket joins a group, it will be able to see all the messages that are emitted to this group as expected.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use jQuery for the DOM manipulation.

We will also make use of the MD5 Node module to hash our password. Although it may seem silly to hash a password that is hardcoded...