Agon

Agon makes it super easy to host an automated competition for different games over a user-defined period. Users can post their own scores through a Discord Bot and see leaderboards in Discord or through a website in order to promote competitiveness between players in an autonomous way.

Agon was originally created for a pinball competition where people play one pinball machine each month, but it translates perfectly to an arcade game competition or basically anything for which high scores can be achieved. Agon is generic, flexible and configurable to suit a lot of different needs.

Limitations

The way Agon is currently set up requires one application cluster to run per Discord server or competition and have a Discord application/bot per cluster. This is because the backend only stores a single set of users, games and scores, meaning it only stores data of a single competition. This is sufficient for my usecase but it would be nice to be able to run multiple competition across multiple Discord servers all from a single backend. That would require quite some extra effort though so I won't implement that just yet.

Agon Docker Compose

This repository contains the Docker Compose file that runs all components of the Agon application:

• Agon UI
• Agon Backend
• Agon Discord Bot
• PostgreSQL Database

Configuration

Rename the .env.example file to .env and change the credentials to some secure values.

Be sure to pick good credentials for the database user as changing them after running the compose for the first time will lead to an error and force you to delete your data (see "Notes").

It's also possible to create an additional .env.dev in which development values can be specified. For example, setting NODE_ENV to development instead of production.

Deployment

First deployment

• Build the images of all components
• Push all images to Docker Hub
• Run docker-compose pull to make sure the latest images are present
• Run docker-compose up -d to start everything
  • This will use the default .env file. Run docker-compose --env-file .env.dev up to use the development environment
• Run docker-compose stop to stop all services

The following services will be exposed:

• agon-ui on port 4200
• agon-backend on port 8080

❗ Be careful not to use docker-compose down to stop the services because the volume that contains all data will be deleted as well ❗

Updating the running containers

• Run docker-compose pull to retrieve the latest images
• Run docker-compose up -d to run the services with their updated images

Seeding the database

The Spring backend can seed the database with initial data if a data.sql was included in the image.

❗ Make sure you ran the docker-compose regularly before doing this ❗

Run the Docker Compose with an extra environment variable to trigger the seeding:

SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=seed-db docker-compose up

This will insert the data. Make sure to stop the compose with CTRL + C after everything has loaded and run it regularly afterwards.

Backups

The database volume can be backed up by running the following command while the Docker Compose is running, as described in the Docker docs:

docker run --rm --volumes-from agon-db -v $(pwd)/backups:/backup ubuntu tar cvf /backup/agon-db-backup.tar /var/lib/pgsql/data

This will create a /backup folder containing a backup tar on the location where the command is executed.

To restore the volume someplace else, make sure to have ran docker-compose up and docker-compose stop once in order to make the database container to insert the data into.

After that the following command can be executed:

docker run --rm --volumes-from agon-db -v $(pwd)/backups:/backup ubuntu bash -c "cd /var/lib/pgsql/data && tar xvf /backup/agon-db-backup.tar --strip 1"

Notes

It's possible that the db service fails with the following error:

FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "<DB_USERNAME>"

What seems to be the problem is described in this comment: docker-library/postgres#203 (comment)

The error occurs when changing the database username or password after the first initialization. Running the following command removes the agon-db services and its volume, which fixes the error but also removes any data in that volume so be careful:

docker-compose rm -fv agon-db