Ranker — Instant / "On-the-fly" Voting

A lightweight, on-the-fly voting app for creating quick polls and sharing them with friends. It's designed for instant votes (create a poll, share a short code, friends connect and vote). There is no user signup/dashboard—participants are ephemeral and identified by short IDs encoded into short-lived JWTs.

Keep it short: create a vote, send the URL to friends, everyone connects over WebSocket and votes in real time.

Key ideas

• Fast, ephemeral polls
• Poll state is stored in Redis (RedisJSON). Polls are small JSON documents with participants, nominations and rankings.
• Real-time interactions use Socket.IO namespaces; HTTP endpoints are used to create polls and obtain tokens.

Tech stack

• Node.js + TypeScript
• NestJS (controllers, services, DI)
• Socket.IO (real-time gateway)
• ioredis + RedisJSON for poll storage
• JWT for short-lived tokens (no signup)

Quick start (development)

1. Install dependencies

   npm install

2. Environment variables (example)

• REDIS_HOST (e.g. localhost)
• REDIS_PORT (e.g. 6379)
• JWT_SECRET (signing secret)
• POLL_DURATION (seconds, default ~3600)
• CLIENT_PORT (for CORS in dev)

3. Run in dev

   npm run start:dev