BrandMeister to Discord Notifier
This is a small nodejs package and script that will connect to the BrandMeister hoseline api, and send a set of discord channels a notification about new activity on a set of talkgroups.
Configuration
This is configured off of 3 environmental variables, which can be supplied by a .env file. See the included example.env for a template with, what I assure you, are invalid tokens.
-
CLIENT_TOKEN which is the discord bot token that you made when you setup the bot identity
-
CHANNELS which is a space seperated list of discord numeric channel identifiers that need to be notified
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TALKGROUPS which is a space seperated list of Brand Meister talk group identifiers to watch for traffic on.
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MINIMUM_REQUIRED_TRANSMIT_TIME_SECONDS is a single integer which is how long a transmission must run to be considered activity.
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ONLY_NOTIFY_IF_NO_TRANSMISSIONS_FOR_SECONDS is a single integer which is how long a talkgroup must be idle before a new notification will be sent.
The discord bot identity will need 'bot', 'Read Messages/View Channels' and 'Send Messages'
Intended operational environment
Build the docker container using the Docker file.
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$ docker build . -t goekesmi/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier
Sending build context to Docker daemon 115.2kB
Step 1/5 : FROM node:16
---> 74b4ba5546c1
Step 2/5 : WORKDIR /usr/src/app
---> Using cache
---> 6fa4d170484f
Step 3/5 : COPY package*.json index.js ./
---> 4af97dc23bca
Step 4/5 : RUN npm install
---> Running in ea89a0161b1d
added 103 packages, and audited 104 packages in 7s
8 packages are looking for funding
run `npm fund` for details
found 0 vulnerabilities
npm notice
npm notice New minor version of npm available! 8.5.5 -> 8.10.0
npm notice Changelog: <https://github.com/npm/cli/releases/tag/v8.10.0>
npm notice Run `npm install -g npm@8.10.0` to update!
npm notice
Removing intermediate container ea89a0161b1d
---> ecf506c74251
Step 5/5 : CMD [ "node", "index.js" ]
---> Running in b6f58d08aca6
Removing intermediate container b6f58d08aca6
---> 35378769594c
Successfully built 35378769594c
Successfully tagged goekesmi/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier:latest
Setup your env file
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$ cp example.env .env
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$ vi .env
Launch your instance
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$ docker run --env-file=.env -d goekesmi/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier
aef062d555e52b2ffa53fca14a23d3aeb92770d58863a0da1d01d636ae1b0e57
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$ docker logs aef062d555e52b2ffa53fca14a23d3aeb92770d58863a0da1d01d636ae1b0e57
Logged in as BrandMeisterTG98638Notifier#2455!
971516057804218478
Connected to BM API
TALK_GROUPS_TO_MONITOR [ 98638 ]
ubuntu@a6a3aeb3-dac3-44ef-8048-43fb42793eea:~/brand-meister-to-discord-notifier$
Error handling
It crashes.
Anything goes wrong at all, we crash. The most common case is attempting to write to a channel id that the bot has not been authorized to write to. The second most common case is not having a valid CLIENT_TOKEN for Discord.
Timeouts and anti annoyance features
The notifier only runs on new transmissions. A new transmission is defined as a transmission after X seconds of silence. By default, X is 900 (15 minutes). Short transmissions of 2 seconds or less are also ignored.
Acknowledgments
This is derived from https://github.com/klinquist/bmPushNotification/ who did most of the heavy lifting before I got here. All bugs found in this are my fault, however.