Today, we are happy to announce Firechat: multi-featured open source chat powered by Firebase. Firechat is simple and easily extensible, and is intended to give our developers a big head start when building chat products on Firebase.

Chat is one of the most fundamental use-cases for Firebase, and we know that designing and building full-featured chat from the ground-up can be time consuming. With Firechat, you get robust, secure chat that works out of the box, and a concise, documented foundation upon which you can customize and extend to meet your specific needs.

Out of the box, Firechat will work seamlessly with your existing authentication, or with Firebase Simple Login. Users can chat with other users via any number of public rooms listed, or public and private chat rooms they create. Users can also view the list of users active in any room, or across any room on the site, search them by name, mute users, or invite them to a chat room.

Since it’s built on Firebase, Firechat is built using only client-side code. Additionally, it is fully secure, relying upon Firebase’s authentication and declarative Security and Firebase Rules to ensure that only the right users can read or write data when you want them to.

Ready to learn more? Check out a live demo, complete with documentation, integration information, and annotated source code at firebase.github.io/firechat.

When you’re ready to start building, star / fork the repo on GitHub, and let us know what you build! We’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and feature requests, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.