How to create a chat room over internet with raspberry pi and python

Question

I have a bit of an open ended questions for you all. I wish to create a simple chat-room such as this example here: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/simple-chat-room-using-python/ but I am lost as how to do it over the internet rather than just local network.

Any pointers/help would be appricated!

Thanks:)

Answer 1

There are multiple ways about this. You can either:

1. Run locally and expose your Python chat system to the internet.
2. Run your Python chat system in some online server provider (Heroku, AWS, etc.).

The first method requires you to do some port-forwarding on your local network, essentially mapping your 127.0.0.1:8081 local server to your public IP (so you would connect via the internet as myip : 8081 ). This method, however, comes with its limitations; when you turn off your computer you are also effectively turning off your server to the rest of the internet. The second method will ensure the server stays on at all times, and is likely what you are looking for. Heroku is a great starting point as they provide a free tier that you can test everything out.