phoebot

Phoebot Phoenixcraft SMP Assistant

Phoebot is an autonomous assistant that hangs out in the Phoenixcraft SMP Minecraft Discord server and helps out with various tasks.

Functions

There are two types of commands/functions that Phoebot supports. Some commands are "targeted" and you need to tag @Phoebot in your request on a public channel, or you need to make the request in a direct message to Phoebot privately for it to work. Without a tag or DM, the command will be ignored.

Other commands operate on any relevant line spoken in a public channel or in a DM session to Phoebot. These commands do not need to be tagged with an "@" in order to work.

Version Announcement Subscriptions

Phoebot will notify individual users or channels whenever a new release of Minecraft or PaperMC is released or made available on our hosting provider. You can control this behavior by subscribing or unsubscribing in a channel or private message window. This tagged command works like this:

subscribe <source> <product> [ optional recipient ]

So, for example, in the #chatter window you could say:

@Phoebot subscribe server.pro paper @here

@Phoebot subscribe papermc paper

@Phoebot subscribe server.pro vanilla

This would add a subscription to that specific channel, and whenever a new version is detected Phoebot will send a message to the channel tagged to the optional recipient @here

You can turn this off by issuing an unsubscribe command.

You can see what subscriptions exist for a channel by using the list subscriptions command.

We will be adding more sources and products over time, including things like popular data packs and add-ons.

Linking Discord and Minecraft accounts

These instructions have moved to this document.

Version Report

Asking Phoebot for a version report will provide a list of the most popular versions that are being tracked by the bot.

Time Conversion Helper

Any time you write a date/time string in Discord, if it follows this strict format, Phoebot will helpfully follow up with time conversions to several other time zones which are relevant to our server users. This makes it easier and less error-prone to announce upcoming server events.

Just include a date-time in this form in your Discord message:

2019-05-25 14:45 CDT

The time must be in 24-hour "military" form. Most popular time zones are supported. If yours is not, please open an issue here on Github describing what you need. The time does not need to be alone on a line, it can be contained within a longer message and the conversion will still work.

Phoebot also has support for the custom time zones "SYDNEY" and "BRISBANE" to allow for special-handling of our favorite Australian users.

Installation and Operation

• To add the bot to a Discord server, visit this activation link.

Phoebot is distributed as a docker image hosted on Docker Hub.

It's running in a Kubernetes Cluster using the object definitions found in the k8s directory. Kubernetes is not required for operation, though. It can be run in any Docker or Docker-complaint container envrionment. During runtime, the bot will make use of the following environment variables:

• DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN is your authentication token for the application/bot that you create on the Discord developer portal.

• MC_CHECK_INTERVAL (optional) controls how frequently Phoebot will check for updated versions of packages.

• PHOEBOT_DEBUG (optional) causes the bot to start up with debug log level instead of waiting for an operator to issue that command in chat. See "Console Logging" below.

• STATE_FILENAME (defaults to /phoebot/phoebot-state.xml) allows you to use a different location for the state file for easier local development.

Developer Notes

Building Phoebot

Phoebot is written in Go and can be built with just the core Go language installed. The preferred development environment uses Bazel for building, testing, and deploying the bot. All you need to set up a local development environment is to install Bazel for your operating system.

The root level Makefile contains targets for common build operations.

make run will build and run the bot locally for testing.

make deploy is what I use to deploy the docker image to docker hub and update Kubernetes to run the new code. This will only work in my production environment. It's not set up to be generally useful.

Console Logging

You can send the command set loglevel to <level> on Discord to dynamically change the verbosity of the console logging. This is useful for debugging.

/data modify block x y z CustomName set value '{"text":"MOO"}'