Discord Player Count Bot

This is a bot implementation for the Discord API to publish the player count of a game server as the current Activity of the bot user.

Installation and usage

There are basically two ways to run and configure this discord bot:

• as a docker container
• as a plain nodejs app

Start the bot

Run as a docker conatiner

The easiest method to install and use this bot is by running it in a docker container. I suggest to use docker-compose for that, however, starting the container with docker run should be fine as well.

version: "3"

services:
  serviceName:
    image: droidwiki/discord-player-count
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./config:/app/config
    environment:
      DISCORD_TOKEN: YOUR_DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN
      # You need more configuration here, look at the Configuration section

You can run as many containers as you want, one container per game server you want to track.

Run on Heroku

The bot natively supports to be deployed on Heroku. However, because of how Heroku works, you need to do some manual steps for your first-time setup as well. Follow this guide to deploy the bot on Heroku. The guide assumes you've installed the heroku cli, as well as git already. Follow the Heroku guide to setup your local environment if you did not do that already.

1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/FlorianSW/discord-player-count-bot.git
2. Create a heroku app: heroku create
3. Add a .env configuration file (e.g. by copying the .env.example file) and configure as needed (see below)
4. Add the .env to the git repository: git add -f .env (you need to use the -f parameter as the config file is ignored)
5. Commit the configuration changes: git commit -m 'Add bot configuration'
6. Push the app to heroku: git push heroku main
7. Go to the Heroku dashboard and open the newly created app
8. Navigate to the Resources tab
9. Disable the web dyno and enable the worker dyno

Run as a plain nodejs app

You can also clone this repository, build the project on your own and start the resulting JavaScript code directly. You need to have nodejs as well as npm installed.

• Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/FlorianSW/discord-player-count-bot.git
• Change to the cloned repository: cd discord-player-count-bot
• Build the project: npm ci
• Start the bot: npm start
• Configure the bot with the necessary configuration

Configure the bot

The bot needs some configuration and supports different sources for the player count, depending on the game server you want to track. Configuration options are environment variables, which you need to export in the environment where your app is running. Alternatively, if you run the app as a plain nodejs app, you can also create a .env file in the root directory of the project and set the options there (see the .env.example file for an example). You need to set the following configuration options independently of the selected game status provider.

Game Status providers

The discord bot uses a game status provider to get the information of currently connected players. There are two provider available right now: steam, steam-query and cftools_cloud (DayZ only).

Steam

The steam provider uses the Steam web api to fetch the player count of the game server. It depends on the game you want to track if that information is available to steam, but most multiplayer games should provide this information.

You need a Steam Web API token in order to use this provider. You can create an API key on this web page: https://steamcommunity.com/dev/apikey When using this provider, the requests made by the Discord bot are counted against the rate limit of this key and you need to agree to the terms of service of Steam. The provider currently polls for changes, once every 10 seconds.

To configure this provider, set the PLAYER_COUNT_PROVIDER configuration option to steam, additionally configure the provider with the following options:

Steam Query

The steam-query provider uses the Steam Query Protocol to fetch the player count from the game server directly. This supports a wide range of different game types and only requires the game servers IP address as well as the steam query port. No api credentials or similar things are needed.

This protocol will query the game server directly. Please make sure that the host where the bot is hosted, is able to access the game server on the specified steam query port.

To configure this provider, set the PLAYER_COUNT_PROVIDER configuration option to steam-query, additionally configure the provider with the following options:

CFTools Cloud (DayZ only)

The cftools_cloud provider uses the CFTools Cloud Game-Details API to fetch information about the current status of a server. CFTools Cloud currently supports the game DayZ only.

To configure this provider, set the PLAYER_COUNT_PROVIDER configuration option to cftools_cloud, additionally configure the provider with the following options:

The used CFTools Cloud APIs of this provider do not need any authentication, hence there is no configuration variable for that.

Map images (Status message only)

The bot can use an image of a map in the status message posted to the channel defined in the DISCORD_MESSAGE_CHANNEL_ID environment variable. In order to configure image urls, create a file named maps.json in the config directory. The key of the object is the name as returned by the game server (this is highly individual per game). The value is an object with the name and imageUrl key describing the map. For example:

{
  "CT": {
    "name": "Carentan",
    "imageUrl": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MarechJ/hll_rcon_tool/master/rcongui/public/maps/carentan.webp"
  }
}

Where CT is the map name returned by the game server.

Make sure that the value of imageUrl is publicly available.