A go-powered Discord bot capable of creating, starting, stopping, and terminating AWS EC2 instances.
About once a year my friends and I all get this crazy urge to play Minecraft with one another. We play the hell out of it for about a week and then drop it to do other things. The discord-ec2-manager project is the spawn of my obessive over-engineering for the love of Minecraft.
But Minecraft isn't this project's only claim to fame! No, you see this project has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves. It is capable of creating / terminating AWS EC2 instances (protected, of course, by a pseudo-randomly generated one time password outputted to the bot's logs), it can start and stop an existing server via a string passed in through the bot's executable, and it can even accept custom tag names and values.
Below you'll find information on how you can use the bot both locally and via Docker, as well as a description of both the bot's command line arguments, and Discord commands.
- Go version
1.16or higher (if you're compiling the executable yourself) - An AWS account with damn near full
EC2permissions, or access to a Role that has saidEC2permissions - Access to a Discord Bot
There will always be at least three required arguments while running discord-ec2-manager locally. Below you'll find a breakdown of available arguments and their requirements below:
Click this dropdown to see a full list of parameter flags!
The t flag sets your Discord Bot Token. There is no default value, and the flag accepts a string as input. For more information on how to generate a Discord Bot Token, check out this article by freecodecamp.org
The -c flag sets your Discord Channel ID, i.e. where the bot will listen for / post new messages. There is no default value, and the flag accepts a string as input. For more information on how to enable developer mode on your Discord client, check out this article by howtogeek.com.
The -i flag sets the EC2 Instance ID of the EC2 instance you want to manage via Discord. This flag is optional, however, it is optional only if you do not intend on using the !create Discord bot command. There is no default value and the flag accepts a string as input.
-i Example via CLI:
.\discord-ec2-manager.exe -t "My Discord Bot Token" -c "My Discord Channel ID" -i "i-abcde1234fghijkl"
The -sg flag sets the EC2 Instance Security Group that you'd like to attach to your EC2 instance upon using the !create Discord bot command. The flag will default to your VPC's default security group and accepts a string as input. NOTE if you're using the -i parameter flag, the -sg flag will do nothing as it is only used in conjunction with the !create Discord bot command.
The -a flag sets the EC2 Instance's Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that you'd like to attach to your EC2 instance upon using the !create Discord bot command. The flag defaults to ami-09e67e426f25ce0d7, which is an Ubuntu 20.04 image located in us-east-1, and accepts a string as an input. NOTE if you're using the -i parameter flag, the -a flag will do nothing as it is only used in conjunction with the !create Discord bot command.
IF YOU ARE NOT USING THE -i PARAMETER FLAG, THE -sn FLAG IS A REQUIRED ARGUMENT. The -sn flag sets the EC2 Instance's Subnet that you'd like to create it in upon using the !create Discord bot command. The flag does not have a default and accepts a string as an input.
The -u flag allows you to enter in the absolute path of your user data script. There is no default value, but the flag accepts a string as an input.
-u Example via CLI:
.\discord-ec2-manager.exe -t "Discord Bot Token" -c "Discord Channel ID" -sg "sg-1234abcde1234" -a "ami-abcde1234abcde" -sn "subnet-1234abcde" -u "C:\Users\my_user\Desktop\userdata.sh"
The -tk flag allows you to set your custom tag's key to be whatever you want. The default value is Name and the flag accepts a string as an input.
The -tv flag allows you to give your custom tag a value of whatever you want. The default value is Created by Discord and the flag accepts a string as an input.
The -svc flag allows you to enter in a custom service name that is running on your discord-ec2-manager managed EC2 instance. This flag accepts a string as an input.
The -sp flag allows you to enter in a custom port that your service (denoted by the -svc flag) is running on in your discord-ec2-manager managed EC2 instance. This flag accepts a string as an input.
The -scp flag allows you to enter in a custom port that your service's healthcheck is running on. When used, discord-ec2-manager will send an HTTP GET request to its managed EC2 instance over the port specified by -scp. This flag accepts a string as an input.
The -ia flag allows you to enter in the ARN of an IAM Role that you would like to attach to your EC2 instance on its creation. Cannot be used if using the -in flag. The flag does not have a default value, and accepts a string as an input.
The -in flag allows you to enter in the Name of the IAM Role that you would like to attach to your EC2 instance on its creation. Cannot be used if using the -ia flag. The flag does not have a default value, and accepts a string as an input.
The -k flag allows you to enter in the Name of the key pair that you would like to attach to your EC2 instance on its creation. This, in conjunction with the rules you specify in your EC2 Instance's Security Group, will allow for remote access to your EC2 instance. The flag does not have a default value, and accepts a string as an input.
The -it flag allows you to configure the Type and Size of your EC2 instance on its creation. The flag defaults to t3a.medium and accepts a string as an input.
With the -o flag, you're able to set the One Time Password's length. The default value is 6 and the flag accepts an integer as an input.
This section will talk about some of the stuff you need to consider when spinning up the bot in AWS' ECS Fargate as a Docker container.
First and foremost, you'll want to build the Docker image by running docker build -t discord-ec2-manager . in the root of discord-ec2-manager/ on your local device. If you're passing in a user data script (useful for the !create bot command), you'll want to make sure to include it in your discord-ec2-manager/discord-ec2-manager directory, and pass in the path to your file via -e PATH_TO_USERDATA=
Upload the image you've just built locally on your machine to AWS' Elastic Container Repository (ECR) service by following AWS' documentation and read up on how to deploy it to ECS Fargate on AWS' documentation page.
👋🏻 HEADS UP: If you're running this in ECS, you may encounter issues if you pass in an empty string for INSTANCE_ID. I have INSTANCE_ID set to i-actualgarbage and things seem to be working fine for me up in AWS Land!
This section will cover the commands available to you once the bot running and a member of your Discord server.
This command will generate a one time password (found in your bot's error logs). If your next message matches the OTP found in your bot's error logs, it will create a new EC2 instance with the tags, security group ID, and in the subnet you provided either via your bot's argument flags on start up OR via your bot's argument flags in your !create Discord message. Additionally, if you use the -u flag (either at start up or in your !create Discord message) to include a path to a User Data script, your EC2 instance will run those commands on intial boot.
Example !create Discord Message: !create -sn subnet-1234abcde5678 -sg sg-1234abcde5678 -ami ami-1234abcde5678 -tk MyCustomTagKey -tv MyCustomTagValue -u /absolute/path/to/userdata.sh -svc MyServiceName -sp 1234 -scp 7777
This command will generate a one time password (found in your bot's error logs). If your next message matches the OTP found in your bot's error logs, it will terminate all discord-ec2-manager managed EC2 instances. You can target specific instances with a -i parameter flag tailing your !terminate command in Discord.
Example !terminate Discord Message: !terminate -i i-1234abcde5678
This command will take a stopped EC2 instance and start it.
This command will take a running EC2 instance and stop it.
This command will return three pieces of information:
- Your EC2 Instance's Instance ID (i-stringofcharacters)
- Your EC2 Instance's Public IP Address (if public IP address is not nil)
- Your EC2 Instance's State (
pending,running,stopped, etc.) - Information regarding your service's name and service port (if
-svcand-spflags were used) - Your service's current status (if
-scpflag was used, and service is serving a valid HTTP endpoint)
This command will tell you all about what each of the commands do on the Discord bot.
If you'd like a user data script that'll start Minecraft on your server's launch and subsequent reboots, as well as automatically stop the EC2 instance when no one is connected to the server via TCP port 25565, check out my mc-server project.
discordgoDocumentation via pkg.go.devaws-sdk-go-v2/awsDocumentation via pkg.go.devaws-sdk-go-v2/configDocumentation via pkg.go.devaws-sdk-go-v2/service/ec2Documentation via pkg.go.dev