A lot of tutorials can be found that teach you how to build a chat app with Socket.io. However, have you ever wondered how to best persist those chat messages?

Enter RethinkDB, a realtime schema-less database. You can store and handle documents easily, just like in MongoDB, but it has reactivity built into it. That means you can subscribe to queries and get notified when data changes, making it the perfect choice when it comes to storing chat messages.

In this article, you will learn how to create a simple chat app with Socket.io and persist the messages in RethinkDB. To show the usefulness of a reactive database, we will also add a simple bot that reacts when you address it.

#nodejs #rethinkdb #socketio