wowstatsgo

Go program to historically record World of Warcraft character stats. Blizzard provides an API but it does not have any historical data, the API just returns what is there "now". I kind of like to see trends over time, so I need to record things over time. It just records stats that I'm interested in, there are many more that could be added, you would just need to change the API call and the database.

This is a rewrite of a Python app that was a rewrite of a Groovy app that all did the same thing (more or less). I did this as a first "real" application in Go since it was a known quantity I could verify things were working and I knew the problem domain ahead of time.

This may not be totally idiomatic Golang, but hopefully it's pretty close. It's longer than the Python version, but I'm actually doing error checking here and using structs, where the Python version is just Python, so not doing anything type-wise or anything. I also got down some rabbit holes and added functionality, so length of code is not a good comparison.

Requirements

Requires go 1.13 or better and now uses modules.

Database

Requires either a Postgres or MariaDB database.

For Postgres:

% createuser -W wowstats
% createdb -O wowstats wowstats

For MariaDB (MySQL), get into MySQL as admin:

mysql> create database wowstats;
mysql> grant all privielges on wowstats.* to 'DBUSER'@'%' identified by 'DBPASSWORD'
mysql> \q

The SQL will prepopulate some values from Blizzard so you do some queries and get class and race information. These are hardcoded to use the id from Blizzard so that you can use the information that the API returns to figure things out. It also populates the class colors (in HTML type format) as defined at:

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Class_colors

https://chasechristian.com/blog/2015/08/the-history-of-wow-class-colors/

They're not really used anywhere, but are available if desired. The Priest color is turned slightly non-white so that it actually will show up.

Configuration

Blizzard API Key

You will need a Blizzard API key from: https://dev.battle.net/

Configuration file

You will need to create a config file. By default it looks in XDG standard ~/.config/wowstats/wowstats.yml.

It should look similar to:

dbDriver: postgres
dbUrl: postgres://DBUSERNAME:DBPASSWORD@DBHOST/DBNAME?sslmode=disable
apiKey: YOUR_API_KEY
email:
  toAddress:
    - your@email.address
    - email2@test.com
  fromAddress: your@email.address
  server: localhost:25
archiveDir: /home/username/.config/wowstats/json

For MySQL, you'll probably want something like:

dbDriver: mysql
dbUrl: DBUSERNAME:DBPASSWORD@tcp(DBHOST)/DBNAME?parseTime=true

• dbDriver - Database driver. Currently allowed values are postgres and mysql

• dbUrl - Database URL to use to connect to the database

• apiKey - Your Blizzard API key

• archiveStats - true or false depending on if you want to save the json

• archiveDir - Directory to store archived JSON files. This is optional and defaults to $HOME/.local/share/wowstats/json

• email - Top level email settings

  • toAddress - Can be multiple email addresses

  • fromAddress - Address email should come from

  • server - Email server to connect to in order to send email

Usage

You will first need to add some characters, you do this by running with the --add flag:

wowstats --add

The program will prompt you for some values and will then ask for confirmation and then add it to the database. Repeat as needed to add characters.

If run without arguments, it will update the stats for every character in the database. It will log some output which can be suppressed with the --quiet flag.

To get a quick summary use the --summary flag. This will output character level and item level for each character in the database in a tabular format to STDOUT.

If run with --emailsummary it will do the same stats as --summary but will format it as an HTML table and email it to the addresses listed in the configuration file.

You'd most likely run this via cron to do updates and then maybe on the next minute do a --emailsummary call to see the status in your email. I just do it once a day because things don't change all that often.