Tlapbot

Tlapbot is an Owncast bot that adds channel points and channel point redeems to your Owncast page.

Similar to Twitch channel points, Tlapbot rewards your viewers with points for watching, and allows them to spend their points on fun gimmicks, challenges, reaction requests, or whatever else you decide.

Tlapbot makes use of Owncast webhooks for chat interactions and Owncast external actions to display an informative dashboard.

Features

The bot gives points to everyone in chat -- 10 points every 10 minutes by default, but the time interval and amount of points can be changed.

The users in chat can then use their points on redeems -- rewards like "choose my background music", "choose what level to play next", "react to this video" etc. You can configure redeems to fit your stream and the activities you're doing, and sort them into categories that can be turned on and off.

The redeems then show on a "Redeems dashboard" that everyone can view as an External Action on the Owncast stream, or at its standalone URL. This allows easy browsing of active challenges and recent redeems, without quitting the stream.

Tlapbot currently doesn't support any automated integrations (or an API). That means no 'Crowd Control' plugin, no instant effects in OBS or VTube Studio, etc. The streamer decides how they respond to redeems or how to make them take effect. (I'd love to support more seamless, automatic redeems in the future!)

Tlapbot bot commands

Tlapbot has these basic commands:

• !help sends a help string in the chat, explaining how tlapbot works.
• !points shows a chatter how many points they have.
• !name_update is a special debug command, to be used with the user's name displays wrong in the redeem dashboard. Normally, it shouldn't have to be used at all, as display names get updated automatically when the bot is running.

(If you change the default prefix of ! to something else, these commands will use the new prefix instead.)

Tlapbot also automatically adds a command for each redeem in the redeems file.

Tlapbot dashboard

Tlapbot dashboard is a standalone page available at /dashboard, made to be easily viewable as an owncast external action. The Tlapbot dashboard shows all redeems and active counters.

Counters are at the top, followed by a list of active milestones and their progress.

Tlapbot dashboard also shows the chatter's points balance when they open it as an external action.

Tlapbot dashboard when viewed as an external action.

Redeem queue tab

The redeem queue shows a chronological list of note and list redeems with timestamps, the redeemer's username, and the note sent.

Redeem queue tab.

Redeems help tab

The dashboard also has a "Redeems help" tab. It shows an explanation of redeem types, and lists all active redeems, along with their price, type and description.

Passive mode

Tlapbot can also be run in passive mode. In passive mode, no redeems will be available, and Tlapbot will not send any messages.

However, it will still give points to viewers, and track username changes.

The Tlapbot dashboard will display a passive mode disclaimer instead of redeems.

Tlapbot redeems types

Tlapbot currently supports four different redeem types. Each type of a redeem works slightly differently, and displays differently on the redeems dashboard.

Redeems can also optionally be sorted into "categories" that can be turned on or off in the config file. This means that the redeems file can list redeems for different types of streams, and you can turn them on or off. Examples on how to do that are listed later in the config file examples.

List

List redeems are basic redeems, most similar to the ones on Twitch.

Every time a chatter redeems a List redeem, the redeem gets added to the list of recent redeems with a timestamp, similar to how redeems on Twitch get added to the Twitch redeem queue.

Unlike the Note redeems, chatters can't write messages to send along with their List redeems, so make sure the redeem makes sense on its own, like "stop talking for one minute", or "drop your weapon", etc.

Note

Note redeems are like List redeems, they get added to the list of recent redeems.

Unlike the List redeems, chatters can add a message to their Note redeems, so this is the ideal type for open-ended redeems like "choose what character I play as next", "choose what song to play next", etc.

Counter

Counter is a unique redeem type, in that it doesn't show up in the list of recent redeems, and counters don't list the people who redeemed them. This redeem type is good for any rewards or incentives where the important thing isn't "who redeemed it?" but rather "how many people redeemed it?"

Instead, the tlapbot dashboard keeps a number for each "counter", and each redeems adds +1 to it.

Counter redeems can be used to gauge interest, tally up votes, or to keep track of how many emotes should be added to an OBS scene.

Milestone

Milestone redeems are long-term goals that are reset separately from other redeems. Viewers donate variable amounts of points that add up together to fulfill the milestone goal.

Each milestone has a goal, a number of points required to send, and the points from all users add together to progress and reach the goal.

Milestones show as a progress bar on the dashboard.

Milestone redeems can be used as long-term community challenges, to start streamer challenges, decide new games to play, etc.

License & Contributions

Tlapbot as it currently is does not come with a license. If you're a content creator, streamer, vtuber, etc. I'll be happy to give you permission to use Tlapbot, or make changes that'd fit your stream.

I didn't make Tlapbot available under a permissive or a free software license, as Owncast is also used by some religious groups, extremist individuals, and dubious corporations to self-host their streams, and I do not want for them to use the bot.

Setup

Tlapbot requires Python 3, probably a fairly recent version of it too. (My live instance runs on Python 3.9.2.)

The Python prerequisites for running tlapbot are the libraries flask, requests and apscheduler. If you follow the installation steps below, they should automatically be installed if you don't have them.

You can also run Tlapbot in a Python virtual environment.

Install from git repo (as a folder)

1. Clone the repository.

2. Run pip install -e . in the root folder. This will install tlapbot as a package in editable more.

3. Set the FLASK_APP environment variable.

   export FLASK_APP=tlapbot

4. Initialize the database:

   python -m flask init-db

5. Create an instance/config.py file and fill it in as needed. Default values are included in tlapbot/default_config.py, and values in config.py overwrite them. (The database also lives in the instance folder by default.)

   Tlapbot might not work if you don't overwrite these:

   SECRET_KEY # get one from running `python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex())'`
   OWNCAST_ACCESS_TOKEN # get one from owncast instance
   OWNCAST_INSTANCE_URL # default points to localhost owncast on default port

6. OPTIONAL: Create an instance/redeems.py file and add your custom redeems.
   If you don't add a redeems file, the bot will initialize the default redeems from tlapbot/default_redeems.py.
   More details on how to write the config and redeems files are written later in the readme.

7. If you've added any new counters or milestones, run refresh-counters or refresh-milestones commands to initialize them into the database.

This installation is fine both for just running Tlapbot as it is, but it also works as a dev setup if you want to make changes or contribute.

Updating should be as easy as git pulling the new version. Sometimes, if an update adds new database tables or columns, you will also need to rerun the init-db CLI command.

Owncast configuration

In the Owncast web interface, navigate to the admin interface at /admin, and then go to Integrations.

Access Token

In the Access Tokens tab, generate an Access Token to put in the config file in the instance folder. The bot needs both the "send chat messages" and "perform administrative actions" permissions, since getting the list of all connected chat users is an administrator-only action.

Webhook

In the webhooks tab, create a Webhook, and point it at your bot's URL with /owncastWebhook added.

In debug, this will be something like localhost:5000/owncastWebhook. If you're not running the debug Owncast instance and bot on the same machine, you can use a tool like ngrok to redirect Owncast traffic to your localhost.

External Action

In External Actions, point the external action to your bot's URL with /dashboard added.

External Actions only work with https. Your server will need to support SSL and https connections for this part to work.

In development, a localhost address will not work with External Actions, since it doesn't provide https. If you use ngrok to redirect Owncast traffic to localhost, it will work because the ngrok connection is https.

External Action config example:

URL: MyTlapbotServer.example/dashboard
Action Title: Redeems Dashboard

Note about https and reverse proxying

Since External Actions require a secure https connection (for the tlapbot dashboard to work), you will need to set up a reverse proxy for tlapbot on your server. I'm not including much information about it here, since some knowledge of the topic is required to set up Owncast itself.

The Owncast documentation about SSL and Reverse proxying is here: https://owncast.online/docs/sslproxies/

If your followed the Owncast recommendation to use Caddy you'd only need to include this in your caddyfile to make the tlapbot dashboard work:

MyTlapbotServer.example {
        reverse_proxy localhost:8000
}

then MyTlapbotServer.example/owncastWebhook is the URL for webhooks, and MyTlapbotServer.example/dashboard is the URL for the dashboard.

(And, obviously, you'd need to own the MyTlapbotServer.example domain, and have an A record pointing to your server's IP address.)

Running the bot

Running in debug:

Set the FLASK_APP variable:

export FLASK_APP=tlapbot

or in Powershell on Windows:

$Env:FLASK_APP = "tlapbot"

Run the app (in debug mode):

python -m flask --debug run 

Running in production:

Set the FLASK_APP variable:

export FLASK_APP=tlapbot

Using the flask debug server for running apps for non-development purposes is not recommended. Rather, you should be using a proper Python WSGI server. On my own live owncast instance, I use gunicorn.

Install gunicorn (if you don't have it installed):

pip install gunicorn

Run the app (with gunicorn):

gunicorn -w 1 'tlapbot:create_app()'

You should also set GUNICORN in your config.py file to True to see Tlapbot logs in your gunicorn output. By default, gunicorn will only show error and critical warnings, but you can set the --log-level argument when running the app to set it to warning, debug or info too.

gunicorn -w 1 --log-level debug 'tlapbot:create_app()'

⚠️WARNING: Because of the way the scheduler is initialized in the project, I recommend running tlapbot with only one gunicorn worker. (-w 1)

If you use multiple workers, each worker sets up its own scheduler, and then users get given points by each worker. (So running the app with -w 4 means users get four times as many points than listed in the config.)

I'd like to fix this shortcoming of tlapbot at some point in the future (so that it can take advantage of extra workers), but for now it's broken like this.

CLI commands: Updating redeems, clearing the queue

Tlapbot comes with a few Click CLI commands. The commands let you clear out counters and the redeems dashboard.

init-db

The init-db command initializes the database.

This command should only be run when first installing tlapbot, or when updating to a tlapbot version that changed the database schema.

clear-queue

The clear-queue command clears the redeem queue and resets all active counters to zero. You should run this command if you're about to start a new stream, and want to start with empty counters and queue.

python -m flask clear-queue

If you've changed the config, and want new/different counters to work, you should run the refresh-counters command first.

refresh-counters

This command deletes old counters that are no longer in the config file, and then adds all counters from the config file. You should run this command every time you've added or removed counters from redeems.py.

python -m flask refresh-counters

This command only changes counters, so if you want to clear the queue with list and note redeems too, you should run clear-queue after it, or run clear-refresh to do both actions together.

clear-refresh

Does the same as clear-queue and refresh-counters together.

python -m flask clear-refresh

Run this if you're adding/removing counters, want to reset them to zero and want to clear all redeems as well.

refresh-milestones

Deletes old milestones and initializes new ones from the redeems file.

python -m flask refresh-milestones

Running this command shouldn't reset progress on milestones that are already in the database and are still in the redeems file.

reset-milestone

Resets progress on a milestone, but only if the milestone had been completed.

python -m flask reset-milestone milestone

hard-reset-milestone

Resets progress on a milestone, regardless of completion status.

python -m flask hard-reset-milestone milestone

Configuration files

Configuration files should be in the instance folder. For folder installation of tlapbot, that's instance/ from the root of the Github repository.

Take care not to replace tlapbot/redeems.py with your redeems config. tlapbot/redeems.py contains functions that handle redeems interactions with the db, and not the redeems config.

config.py

Values you can include in config.py to change how the bot behaves.

(config.py should be in the instance folder: instance/config.py for folder install.)

Mandatory

Including these values is mandatory if you want tlapbot to work.

• SECRET_KEY is your secret key. Get one from running python -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex())'
• OWNCAST_ACCESS_TOKEN is the owncast access token that owncast will use to get list of users in chat. Generate one in your owncast instance.
• OWNCAST_INSTANCE_URL is the full URL of your owncast instance, like "http://MyTlapbotServer.example"

Optional

Including these values will overwrite their defaults from /tlapbot/default_config.py.

• POINTS_CYCLE_TIME decides how often channel points are given to users in chat, in seconds.
• POINTS_AMOUNT_GIVEN decides how many channel points users receive.
• PASSIVE if True, sets Tlapbot into passive mode, where no redeems are available. The bot will still track username changes and give out points.
• LIST_REDEEMS if True, all redeems will be listed after the !help command in chat. This makes the !help output quite long, so it's False by default.
• GUNICORN if True, sets logging to use gunicorn's logger. Only set this to True if you're using Gunicorn to run tlapbot.
• ACTIVE_CATEGORIES can be an empty list [], or a list of strings of activated categories (i.e. ["chatting", "singing"]). Redeems with a category included in the list will be active, redeems from other categories will not be active. Redeems with no category are always active.
• PREFIX is a single character string that decides what character gets used as a prefix for tlapbot commands. (i.e. you can use ? instead of !). Symbols are recommended. Prefix cannot be longer than one character.

Example config:

An example to show what your config like could look like

SECRET_KEY= # string with secret key would be here.
OWNCAST_ACCESS_TOKEN="5AT0gbe9ZuzDunsBG0rcwfalQNTi3fvV70NPvvQHk3I="
OWNCAST_INSTANCE_URL="http://MyTlapbotServer.example"
POINTS_CYCLE_TIME=300
LIST_REDEEMS=True
ACTIVE_CATEGORIES=["gaming"]

redeems.py

redeems.py is a file where you define all your custom redeems. Tlapbot will work without it, but it will load a few default, generic redeems from tlapbot/default_redeems.py.

(redeems.py should be in the instance folder: instance/redeems.py for folder install.)

default_redeems.py:

REDEEMS={
    "hydrate": {"price": 60, "type": "list"},
    "lurk": {"price": 1, "type": "counter", "info": "Let us know you're going to lurk."},
    "react": {"price": 200, "type": "note", "info": "Attach link to a video for me to react to."},
    "request": {"price": 100, "type": "note", "info": "Request a level, gamemode, skin, etc."},
    "go_nap": {"goal": 1000, "type": "milestone", "info": "Streamer will go nap when the goal is reached."},
    "inactive": {"price": 100, "type": "note", "info": "Example redeem that is inactive by default", "category": ["inactive"]}
}

File format

redeems.py is a config file with just a REDEEMS key, that assigns a dictionary of redeems to it. Each dictionary entry is a redeem, and the dictionary keys are strings that decide the chat command for the redeem. The redeem names shouldn't have spaces in them. The value is another dictionary that needs to have an entry for "type" and an entry for "price" for non-milestones or "goal" for milestones. Optionally, each redeem can also have "info" and "category" entries.

• "price" value should be an integer that decides how many points the redeem will cost. Milestone redeems don't use the "price" value, they instead need to have a "goal".
• "goal" is a required field for milestone goals. It should be an integer, deciding the amount of points required to complete the milestone.
• "type" value should be either "list", "counter", "note" or "milestone". This decided the redeem's type, and whether it will show up as a counter at the top of the dashboard or as an entry in the "recent redeems" chart.
• "info" value should be a string that describes what the command does. It's optional, but I recommend writing one for all "list", "note" and "milestone" redeems (so that chatters know what they're redeeming and whether they should leave a note).
• "category" is an optional list of strings, the categories the redeem is in. If a category from the list is in ACTIVE_CATEGORIES from config.py, then the redeem will be active. It will not be active if none of the categories are in ACTIVE_CATEGORIES. Redeems with no category are always active.