Official Dart Client for Stream Chat
The official Dart client for Stream Chat, a service for building chat applications. This library can be used on any Dart project and on both mobile and web apps with Flutter.
Quick Links
- Register to get an API key for Stream Chat
- Flutter Chat Tutorial
- Chat UI Kit
- Chat Client Docs
V4 Migration Guide
For upgrading from V3 to V4, please refer to the V4 Migration Guide
Changelog
Check out the changelog on pub.dev to see the latest changes in the package.
Getting started
Add dependency
Add this to your package's pubspec.yaml file, use the latest version
dependencies:
stream_chat: ^latest-version
You should then run flutter packages get
Example Project
There is a detailed Flutter example project in the example
folder. You can directly run and play on it.
Setup API Client
First you need to instantiate a chat client. The Chat client will manage API call, event handling and manage the websocket connection to Stream Chat servers. You should only create the client once and re-use it across your application.
final client = StreamChatClient("stream-chat-api-key");
Logging
By default the Chat Client will write all messages with level Warn or Error to stdout.
Change Logging Level
During development you might want to enable more logging information, you can change the default log level when constructing the client.
final client = StreamChatClient("stream-chat-api-key", logLevel: Level.INFO);
Custom Logger
You can handle the log messages directly instead of have them written to stdout, this is very convenient if you use an error tracking tool or if you want to centralize your logs into one facility.
myLogHandlerFunction = (LogRecord record) {
// do something with the record (ie. send it to Sentry or Fabric)
}
final client = StreamChatClient("stream-chat-api-key", logHandlerFunction: myLogHandlerFunction);
Offline storage
To add data persistance you can extend the class ChatPersistenceClient
and pass an instance to the StreamChatClient
.
class CustomChatPersistentClient extends ChatPersistenceClient {
...
}
final client = StreamChatClient(
apiKey ?? kDefaultStreamApiKey,
logLevel: Level.INFO,
)..chatPersistenceClient = CustomChatPersistentClient();
We provide an official persistent client in the stream_chat_persistence package.
import 'package:stream_chat_persistence/stream_chat_persistence.dart';
final chatPersistentClient = StreamChatPersistenceClient(
logLevel: Level.INFO,
connectionMode: ConnectionMode.background,
);
final client = StreamChatClient(
apiKey ?? kDefaultStreamApiKey,
logLevel: Level.INFO,
)..chatPersistenceClient = chatPersistentClient;
Contributing
Code conventions
- Make sure that you run
dartfmt
before commiting your code - Make sure all public methods and functions are well documented
Running tests
- run
flutter test
Releasing a new version
-
update the package version on
pubspec.yaml
andversion.dart
-
add a changelog entry on
CHANGELOG.md
-
run
flutter pub publish
to publish the package
Watch models and generate JSON code
JSON serialization relies on code generation; make sure to keep that running while you make changes to the library
flutter pub run build_runner watch