MagnoliaJS 2022

MagnoliaJS Conference 2022

The MagnoliaJS Conference was first founded by J.C. Hiatt in 2019. Since then, the conference has connected over 450 members on Discord alone! Web development and software engineering go hand in hand, so naturally I’m interested in a lot of the topics that are discussed at MagnoliaJS events. I plan on taking part in this exciting conference and I’m hopeful that you might find it interesting too! I’ve collected all the details I personally would care about here (I’m being selfish because I will be referencing this during the event myself and I’m just writing it ahead of time).

September 13th–14th, 2022

380 South Lamar Street, Jackson MS 39201

Jackson, MS events

• Opening night mixer @ The Westin Jackson (407 S Congress St, Jackson, MS 39201)
• Day 1 Evening Social @ MS Museum of Art (conference venue)
• Conference Afterparty @ JXN Tech District google maps, twitter

Speakers

• Dr. Nashlie Sephus twitter
• Michael Liendo twitter
• Waller Goble twitter
• Taylor Desseyn twitter
• William Hill twitter
• Todd Libby twitter
• Nerando Johnson twitter
• Domitrius Clark twitter
• Alex Riviere twitter
• Bekah Hawrot Weigel twitter
• Vince Falconi twitter
• Gant Laborde twitter

Sponsored by

• Cloudinary
• FlightControl
• CircleCI
• Morgan White Group

Using Discord4J in Spring Boot

It’s been a minute

I fell off the blog-writing momentum once JXN Film Club’s Summer Movie Nights kicked into high gear. Balancing blog-writing and a film club and a full-time job is a lot of time!

I’ve still been writing my own bits of software, as always, so I figured I’d give some insight into what I’ve been working on.

michaellamb.dev on Discord

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen the Discord server widget in the About Me section. Clicking on it or visiting this link will get you into the official michaellamb.dev server. Come chat with me!

Discord4J

I had a pretty simple problem which motivated me to stand up a Discord bot: I run a Valheim dedicated server for myself and other friends on Discord but beyond attempting to connect to the server in-game there wasn’t an easy way to see the server’s status or if anyone was online.

Connecting the Steam Web API to Uptime Kuma, my status montioring app, let me track the uptime of the game server. The app supports the creation of multiple status pages, so I added valheim.michaellamb.dev and pinned a message with connection details.

Where the Discord bot comes in is updating its presence to a status message. Bots and members alike can have a presence status, indicating a current activity. The michaellamb.dev bot has a presence shown below.

Agent Logic

I won’t go into the how to set up a Discord bot using Discord4J, their docs can do that better than I can. Let’s just look at the agent logic used to update the presence.

    @Scheduled(fixedRate = 1, timeUnit = TimeUnit.MINUTES)
    @Override
    public void checkValheimPlayerCount() {
        try {
            SteamGameServerStatusResponse response = steamGameServerService.getValheimInstanceStatus();

            if (response.isNotEmpty()) {
                SteamGameServerStatusResponse.Server valheimServer = response.getResponse().getServers().get(0);
                playerCount.set(valheimServer.getPlayers());
                String activity = String.format("Valheim | %d/10 Online", playerCount.get());

                LOG.info("valheimServer [{}], playerCount [{}], activity [{}]",
                valheimServer.toString(),
                playerCount.toString(),
                activity.toString());

                LOG.info("Updating ClientPresence with ClientActivity for Valheim");
                client.updatePresence(ClientPresence.online(ClientActivity.playing(activity)))
                .block();
            } else {
                LOG.info("Updating ClientPresence with ClientActivity for idling");
                client.updatePresence(ClientPresence.online(ClientActivity.streaming("status.michaellamb.dev", STATUS_URL)))
                .block();
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            LOG.error("An exception occurred", e);
        }
    }

The @Scheduled annotation tells Spring Boot to invoke this method on the given schedule, in this instance once per minute. Everything else is straightforward: we invoke steamGameServerService.getValheimInstanceStatus() and store it in response.

It may be helpful to know what Steam Web API sends back in a response here before moving on, so I’ve included the response that we should receive when the Valheim server is up.

{
    "response": {
        "servers": [{

            "addr": "173.235.136.46:2457",

            "gameport": 2456,
            "steamid": "90158276832560132",
            "name": "michaellamb",
            "appid": 892970,
            "gamedir": "valheim",

            "version": "1.0.0.0",

            "product": "valheim",
            "region": -1,
            "players": 0,
            "max_players": 64,
            "bots": 0,
            "map": "michaellamb",
            "secure": false,
            "dedicated": true,
            "os": "w",

            "gametype": "0.208.1"

        }]
    }
}

If the response comes back with an empty array of servers then we consider the game server to be down. If this happens, then bot presence is updated to an “idling” fallback status. Otherwise, the bot looks at response.servers.players and updates the total number of players in the tracking variable playerCount.

You may be wondering whether this agent/business logic is designed with other servers in mind. The service layer which handles the request/response to and from the Steam Web API specifically filters by appid, meaning that only Valheim game servers will be returned in this particular response.

This simple task felt like a good introduction to using Discord4J. It’s well-supported and is compatible with the Spring ecosystem.

Future

I use Discord webhooks with Uptime Kuma to get notifications when services go up or down, but I’d like to be able to fetch other stats from Uptime Kuma that are only accessible via the dashboard. The dashboard is LAN only so I’d have to use my self-hosted VPN to be able to look at it. Future work may include integrating slash commands to the bot which fetches this data and displays it.

Lately

I love having happy plants pic.twitter.com/sNRtFTUpCx

— Michael Lamb he/him (@themichaellamb) July 11, 2022

GitHub Discussions - Spring Boot Demo App

Now Announcing GitHub Discussions

GitHub features a Discussions pane on code repositories so that communities can share thoughts and feedback without having to open a new issue.

This post is to announce that I want YOU to leave a comment on my announcement post over on GitHub. My blog is more informative than interactive (and I like it that way) but GitHub as a tool for organizing community around code is right up my alley. I hope you’ll join me and we can connect.

Follow this link to see the Discussion announcement.

Leave a comment on my announcement post

And when you’re done, check out the repo! I’ve enabled Discussion on my Spring Boot Demo app and there’s simply no reason you shouldn’t pull the code, try it out yourself, and then come back to the Discussions pane to tell me what you learned.

BE KIND ONLINE

Valheim - Dedicated Server

Valheim

A brutal exploration and survival game from Iron Gate AB and published by Coffee Stain Publishing for 1-10 players, set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage!

The game was released Feb 2, 2021 and has received very positive reviews on Steam and in C Spire Gaming’s Discord server.

Some college buddies and I first played on a world we’d been passing around via Google Drive. I was then volunteered to host the world on a dedicated server and I wanted to build a small system to check on the status of the server such that I could make it easy for my friends to know its uptime status.

In version 1.14.0 of Uptime Kuma a new feature was introduced which enabled serving new status pages from an existing app instance. Utilizing this, I created valheim.michaellamb.dev which is a status page for our dedicated server.

Uptime Kuma - cloudflared integration

Uptime Kuma, the project behind status.michaellamb.dev, recently merged a pull request which adds an interesting ease-of-use feature: integration with Cloudflare’s tunneling technology using cloudflared, a tunnel client which simplifies proxying requests from behind a firewall by leveraging the Cloudflare network.

Pros:

• Free of charge
• Full GUI, zero-config files
• You can put your Uptime Kuma behind firewall
• No need to expose your real IP
• No need nginx, caddy, traefik etc
• Zero-config SSL
• Free SSL

Cons:

• (Not a con if you are already using Cloudflare) Your domain’s nameserver have to move to Cloudflare
• add 30MB to the docker base image

Once installed, you can authenticate cloudflared into your Cloudflare account and begin creating Tunnels to serve traffic to your origins.

1. Create a Tunnel with these instructions
2. Route traffic to that Tunnel:

• Via public DNS records in Cloudflare
• Or via a public hostname guided by a Cloudflare Load Balancer
• Or from WARP client private traffic