While developing a chat application with nodejs and socket.io, I am interested in including a feature that displays the count of users that are currently online. How can I implement this?

edit

You can implement this feature by keeping track of the number of users who connect to your application using socket.io.

There are a few steps involved in implementing this feature:

1. When a user connects to your application, increment a counter variable:

let usersOnline = 0;

io.on('connection', socket => {

  // Increment the counter variable
  usersOnline++;

  socket.on('disconnect', () => {
    // Decrement the counter variable
    usersOnline--;
  });

});

1. Emit the updated counter variable to all connected clients:

io.on('connection', socket => {

  usersOnline++;

  io.emit('user count', usersOnline);

  socket.on('disconnect', () => {
    usersOnline--;
    io.emit('user count', usersOnline);
  });

});

1. Display the user count on the client side:

socket.on('user count', count => {
  document.getElementById('user-count').innerText = `Users online: ${count}`;
});

This code assumes that there is an element on the client side with an id of "user-count" that you can update with the current user count.

By implementing these steps, you should be able to display the count of users that are currently online in your chat application.