Flox Tools for Ruby

What is Flox?

Flox is a server backend especially for game developers, providing all the basics you need for a game: analytics, leaderboards, custom entities, and much more. The focus of Flox lies on its scalability (guaranteed by running in the Google App Engine) and ease of use.

While you can communicate with our servers directly via REST, we provide powerful SDKs for the most popular development platforms, including advanced features like offline-support and data caching. With these SDKs, integrating Flox into your game is just a matter of minutes.

• More information about Flox can be found on Flox.cc
• The source code of the Ruby SDK is hosted on GitHub.com
• The API reference of the Ruby SDK can be found on RubyDoc.info

How to install the Flox Gem

Flox is distributed as a Ruby Gem, so you can install it just like any other gem:

gem install flox

How to use the Flox executable

The Gem comes with a small command-line script that is automatically added to your system PATH. The script can be used to carry out certain tasks very easily. To get a list of supported commands, run

flox --help

As an example, here's how to download all the log files of a certain day that have at least severity "warning":

flox load_logs --game_id "id" --game_key "key" --hero_key "key" \
               --query "day:2014-03-10 severity:warning" \
               --destination "logs"

Note that you need to authorize with a "Hero" key. A hero is a special Flox player that has super-user rights; create it in the Flox online interface.

You can use that same key to export all the entities of a specific type. Like this:

flox export_entities --game_id="id" --game_key="key" --hero_key="key" --type="Player"

This will download JSON files with all player data into a subfolder of the working directory. Beware: you will need to add an index for the "updatedAt" property to this entity type first (which is done in the online interface, as well). This makes it possible that repeating the same export will only download new and changed files.

How to use the Flox SDK

The Ruby client is designed to be used not in games, but in scripts that help you operate your games. You can use it e.g. to automatically download your leaderboards or certain entities for backup. It's also easy to utilize Flox via 'irb', allowing quick introspection into your server data.

To start up, create a Flox instance with your game id and key:

flox = Flox.new('game-id', 'game-key')

Just like in the command-line script, you'll need to login as a 'Hero':

flox.login_with_key('hero-key')

We're done with the preparations! Now let's look at some of the things you can do.

Working with Entities

# load an entity with a certain type and id
entity = flox.load_entity('entity-type', 'entity-id') # => Flox::Entity

# modify it via the []-operator
entity[:myProperty] = 'something'

# save or delete at will
flox.save_entity(entity)
flox.delete_entity(entity)

Accessing leaderboards

# load scores from a leaderboard
scores = flox.load_scores('leaderboard-id', :today) # => Array of Flox::Score
best_score = scores.first.value
best_player_id = scores.first.player_id

Loading logs

# find all logs from a certain day that contain a warning or error
logs = flox.find_logs('day:2014-02-22 severity:warning')
num_logs = logs.length
logs.each { |log| puts log[:duration] }

Where to go from here:

This is just the tip of the iceberg! Have a look at the complete API Reference to find out what's possible. New features will be added regularly!