Tools to ping a Minecraft server for the names of online players and save it to a database, and plot a timeline graph of online players over time.
Helps server members determine the playing schedule of an elusive player they wish to interact with, useful for competitive and content-creation server playstyles. Also helps players seeking interaction to align their playtime to the most busy part of the day.
WARNING: Your IP address is exposed to the server whenever you ping it using the main.py script. While this does not appear in console.log, server admins may be able to see this information. Use a VPN.
- main.py uses the mcstatus python library to make a Status API call to the server using the Server List Ping Protocol to retrieve online players. This is the same information that a Minecraft client retrieves to show data on the Multiplayer screen.
- Timestamp in UTC, Player name, and whether the server is contactable is logged in a time series MongoDB Atlas Database
- app.py pulls data from the MongoDB databse, and plots a Plotly timeline within a dash webapp.
Requirements:
- Tested in python 3.10
- MongoDB >= 5.0 (timeseries feature is used)
Visualisation Placeholder (Screenshot of actual graph coming soon):
- Tested in python 3.10
- Install required libraries. You may wish to use zipapp to create a .pyz archive
- Create a MongoDB database on Atlas.
- Fill in the variables for the database access, database name, collection and your Olson timezone name at the top of the scripts
- Run a cron job every 5 minutes. The script extrapolates the presence of a player to the next 5th minute. You may wish to use cronitor to track the cron job
- Run the dash webapp to view the plot