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Prerequisites
This page will guide you through the process of getting the necessary information for ESB to function.
Epic Scraper needs 3 key pieces of information for it to function, these are:
- TG_Bot_ID
- SERVER_PASSWORD
- CRON_SCHEDULE
Each are explained in more detail below.
You will need to register a bot with Telegram's bot commander, @Botfather.
See Telegram's documentation for creating a bot
Once you have registered a new bot you should receive the bot token, it should look similar to 110201543:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw
This is the value that you will be passing to Epic Scraper Bot.
When hosting your own instance of ESB, you may choose to keep your server private so that unknown people cannot flood your server. If this is the case, you can set ESB to require a password when registering a chat. This will prevent random users from registering with your server.
The Value provided here will be set as the registration password. If no value is provided, anyone will be able to register with the server.
This setting specifies how often ESB will search for new games.
The setting is specified in standard CRON format (E.g.: 30 12 * * *)
The Crontab Guru website is a great way to test your CRON schedule, it also shows what each value means.
Epic Games seems to release the new games every Thursday at 3:00pm UTC.
The schedule 0 15 * * * would check for new games every day at 3:00pm UTC.
I personally run the schedule 2 hours after Epic's release, this is to create a buffer in case Epic's release is slightly delayed. Additionally, its so that everyone has a chance to get home from work and settle in before being notified about the games.
I also run the schedule every day so that we get notified if there is a single day giveaway over and above the weekly giveaway.
Once you have the following information, you can move onto the setup.
The application can be run in 2 modes, as a Docker container or as a script directly on the machine.