k04an / WoWatch

Application for tracking players online on private World of Warcraft servers

WoWatch

An application for tracking players online on World of Warcraft private servers.

Speak russian?

Файл README доступен на русском.

General info

Why?

So, some of the WoW servers display number of players online thier websites. But the problem is that you can only see current players number. But you can't actually track how the amount of players changed over time.

How does this work?

So basically this application is parsing information about players online from WoW server's website and saves it to database with timestamp. Then you can see this information in charts.

Wanna try?

Application is available via this link.

Technical info

What's under the hood?

The application is written is JavaScript and using NodeJs for its interpretation and following node modules to make things working:

• Express - it's a framework which is used for web routing and plays a role of web server in general.
• Sequelize - An ORM module for NodeJS. Used to interact with database without SQL queries, but with JavaScript objects and methods.
• EJS - template engine that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript.

And some other modules that make things easier to do. Like dateformat and dotenv. Full list of packages used can be found in package.json.

Bootstrap - frontend toolkit which was to for markup and styling.

Installation

Get started

Copy this repo on your server:

git clone https://github.com/k04an/WoWatch

Install dependencies

npm install

And create .env file in app directory to configure an app. The .env options is given below.

Run db-sync.js script to create database structure.

npm db-sync

And the last thing, run scripts web.js to launch web server and collector.js for data parsing. That can be done by creating daemon or using process manager for Node like PM2.

npm i -g pm2
pm2 start web.js
pm2 start collector.js

.env configuration

Application can be configured with .env file. The list of options is given below.

DB_NAME="" # Name of the database
DB_USER="" # User which will be used
DB_PASSWORD="" # user's passwork
DB_HOST="" # Host for database

WEB_PORT=80 # Port for webserver to use (optional)

# Frequency of parsing. Using CRON mask (optional, default: once an hour)
COLLECTOR_CRONMASK="*/30 * * * *"

COLLECTOR_API_PORT=3761 # Port for internal api. Used to get collection status