🚀 SyncEditor Server

Backend server for the SyncEditor collaborative code editor platform. Built for performance, security, and real-time synchronization.

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📖 Overview

SyncEditor Server is a high-performance Node.js service providing the backbone for real-time collaboration. It leverages Socket.IO for low-latency communication and integrated OpenTelemetry for production-grade observability.

Authentication model: the current implementation is intentionally simple – clients supply a plain username when emitting the join event; the server does not perform any credentials check. This keeps the focus on the collaboration features and makes the service easier to run locally.

✨ Features

• ⚡ Real-Time Sync: Low-latency code and chat synchronization.
• 🏢 Room Management: Secure, isolated collaborative environments.
• 🛡️ Production Security: Rate limiting, XSS protection, and CSP headers.
• 🔍 First-Class Observability: Distributed tracing with Jaeger v2 and log aggregation with Grafana/Loki.
• 🧪 Simple auth: clients provide a username when joining; no backend login required.

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Flow of the things how it's going on

📊 Monitoring & Observability

Standardized observability using OpenTelemetry and Jaeger v2.

🔍 Distributed Tracing

Visualize the entire lifecycle of collaborative events.

System interaction visualization and latency analysis.


Deep dive into span processing and event execution.


Real-time collaboration concurrency tracking.

📝 Structured Logs & Aggregation

Powered by winston, enriched with OpenTelemetry context, and aggregated via Loki.

1. Enrichment: Logs are automatically injected with trace_id and span_id.
2. Scraping: Promtail tails the JSON log files.
3. Aggregation: Logs are pushed to Loki for indexing.
4. Visualization: View and query logs in Grafana, with direct links to distributed traces.
5. Insights: Real-time log monitoring for rapid debugging.

Centralized log aggregation in Grafana Loki.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

• Runtime: Node.js (v18+)
• Framework: Express.js
• Real-time: Socket.IO
• Auth: none (naive username-based)
• Tracing: Jaeger
• Log Aggregation: Loki & Promtail
• Visualization: Grafana
• Observability: OpenTelemetry
• Logging: Winston

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🚀 Quick Start

1. Installation

npm install

2. Configuration

Create a .env file:

PORT=5555
FRONTEND_URL=http://localhost:5173
NODE_ENV=development
SOCKET_PING_TIMEOUT=120000
SOCKET_PING_INTERVAL=30000

3. Execution

Command	Description
npm run dev	Start development server with Nodemon
npm start	Run production-ready server

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🔌 Socket.IO API

📤 Outgoing (Client → Server)

• join: { roomId, username }
• leave: { roomId, username }
• code-change: { roomId, code, sender }
• send-message: { roomId, message, sender, time }

📥 Incoming (Server → Client)

• user-joined: { clients, username, socketId }
• user-left: { socketId, username }
• code-change: { code, sender }
• receive-message: { message, sender, time }
• error: { message }

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🏗️ Project Structure

Server/
├── src/
│   ├── index.js             # Entry point: Starts server & initializes OTel
│   ├── app.js               # Application setup: Middleware, routes, & error handling
│   ├── config/              # Configuration files
│   │   ├── otel.js          # OpenTelemetry SDK configuration
│   │   └── clerk.js         # Authentication configuration (Clerk)
│   ├── middleware/          # Express middleware
│   │   ├── auth.js          # Authentication & user identification
│   │   ├── rateLimiter.js   # Resource usage control
│   │   └── validator.js     # Input schema validation
│   ├── sockets/             # Socket.IO implementation
│   │   ├── index.js         # Socket server initialization
│   │   └── handlers.js      # Core logic for code sync, chat, & room management
│   └── utils/               # Helper functions
│       └── logger.js        # Winston structured logging setup
├── otel-config/             # Observability infrastructure config
│   ├── logging/             # Loki, Promtail, & Grafana setup
│   └── otel/                # OTel Collector configurations
├── k8s/                     # Kubernetes manifests
│   ├── deployment.yaml      # App deployment & container spec
│   ├── service.yaml         # LoadBalancer & port config
│   └── hpa.yaml             # Horizontal Pod Autoscaler
├── assets/                  # Documentation images & screenshots
├── tests/                   # Integration & Unit test suites
├── Dockerfile               # Production container definition
└── package.json             # Dependencies & scripts

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🛠️ Detailed Component Roles

• Socket Handlers: The brain of the real-time engine, handling complex concurrency for code edits and ensuring all room participants stay in sync.
• OTel Infrastructure: Provides the full observability pipeline, mapping application events to distributed traces for debugging production issues.
• K8s Manifests: Production-ready configurations for deploying the server in a scalable Kubernetes environment with automated scaling.
• Security Middleware: Multi-layered protection including rate limiting to prevent abuse and schema validation for all incoming socket/HTTP payloads.

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🛡️ Security

• Rate Limiting: 100 req/15min per IP.
• Validation: Strict schema validation for all inputs.
• Headers: Helmet-secured headers (XSS, HSTS, CSP).

🗺️ Roadmap

• Tracing (Jaeger)
• Centralized Log Aggregation (Loki/Grafana)
• Distributed Metrics (Prometheus)
• Health Dashboard UI
• Custom Performance Spans

⚖️ License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.