summary

This is a discord bot which scrapes the current status of a game at webdiplomacy and announces that information on discord.

It also incorporates a very rudimentary cli tool which does the same thing on the host.

Note that at the moment dipbot can only handle a single game, although the CLI functionality can fairly straightforwardly be adjusted to parse different games (there's guidance on this below.)

daemon functionality

The daemon, which is run as dipbot daemon, spawns a discord bot based on discord.py. It depends on a couple of environment variables described below.

Here is the bot's help dialogue, which describes the commands it supports:

Status:
  status   instructs me to report on the status of my webdip game.
  status!  same as `$status`, but mentioning @everyone
  status?  same as `$status`, but with additional information about the game
  status?! same as `$status?`, but mentioning @everyone
​No Category:
  help     Shows this message

Type $help command for more info on a command.
You can also type $help category for more info on a category.

A $status request produces output in the following format:

"It is the [game-phase] of the [season] of [year].

We are awaiting the orders of:
[list of non-ready players with their order statuses]
There are [N] days until the deadline, which is at [date]"

run as dipbot report, dipbot will produce the output of $status.

configuration

both dipbot daemon and dipbot report receive their configuration from environment variables. Both need to know which game to look at; dipbot daemon also needs to know its discord API key.

compulsory environment variables

In order to know which game to parse, the environment variable WEBDIP_GAME_ID must be set to the corresponding webdiplomacy.com game id. This is the number at the end of the webdiplomacy url for the game; for instance, in the following URL, the id is 111111

https://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=111111

In addition, to host the discord bot yourself it's necessary to create a bot account as described here, and to set the environment variable DISCORD_API_KEY to the value of the bot's token.

these environment variables can be set for a single session like this:

$ export WEBDIP_GAME_ID=[game_id]
$ export DISCORD_API_KEY=[api_key]

that will let dipbot work in the current shell; to avoid having to run these commands, you can put the variable assignments in the config file for your shell (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc or whatever).

handling multiple games

Both dipbot daemon and dipbot report will get whatever game has the id specified by WEBDIP_GAME_ID. You could therefore make little wrapper scripts for dipbot report and get reports on as many games as you liked. In future an option to specify the game id on the commandline will be added to eliminate this minor inconvenience.

installation

the most recent release is available from pip:

$ pip install --user dipbot

after which, so long as your PATH is properly configured, you should be able to run dipbot directly from the shell:

$ dipbot

usage

there are two subcommands available:

$ dipbot report

which parses the status of the game and reports it to the shell before quitting, and

$ dipbot daemon

which attempts to initialize a discord bot corresponding to the token stored in DISCORD_API_KEY.