Help getting the Blizzard API working

Unfortunately I don't have experience with Oauth. I'm just simple ASP.NET developer but in your case, I would work around the issue. I'd write a simple web crawler that would collect data from https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/game/status and then store them wherever you want (in some db). Such webcrawler is easy to write in Java and could work in certain time intervals.

That could definitely work - SentientGypsy has already written a few scrapers for barrens.chat with Python and I’m sure this wouldn’t be too hard.

That said, I’d like to be able to make calls to the blizz API directly so I can at some point in the future add more rich features to the site like pulling people’s characters, auction house values etc. I see this as a like way of starting out with something simple.

We use Oauth with Facebook at work, seems it was quick to implement there. I spent a few min on the https://github.com/benweier/blizzard.js what part do you get stuck on? Some dependency problem? If you get the "npm install" part going , step 1 and 2 looks pretty straight forward.

We use Oauth with Facebook at work, seems it was quick to implement there. I spent a few min on the https://github.com/benweier/blizzard.js what part do you get stuck on? Some dependency problem? If you get the "npm install" part going , step 1 and 2 looks pretty straight forward.

Thanks for the response 5bx.

EDIT: I've tried to install it from command line but I get various errors: what do these mean?

teebling$ npm install blizzard.js --save
npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/Users/teebling/package.json'
npm notice created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/Users/teebling/package.json'
npm WARN teebling No description
npm WARN teebling No repository field.
npm WARN teebling No README data
npm WARN teebling No license field.

+ blizzard.js@3.0.0
added 8 packages from 12 contributors and audited 8 packages in 3.619s
found 0 vulnerabilities

Also, from their document:
Step 1: require() and initialize() Blizzard.js within your application:
const blizzard = require('blizzard.js').initialize({
key: BLIZZARD_CLIENT_ID,
secret: BLIZZARD_CLIENT_SECRET,
});


By putting my client ID and secret in a .JS file surely that would be compromising the security of it since the file is accessible by anyone with a path to it?

The WARN seems to come from the lack of 'npm init' - see https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/issues/261 One user solved it with "Indeed what it wants is a package.json file, obtained by typing npm init. Then I was able to do an npm install with success."

I'll get back to the next question later. :)

The WARN seems to come from the lack of 'npm init' - see https://github.com/visionmedia/debug/issues/261 One user solved it with "Indeed what it wants is a package.json file, obtained by typing npm init. Then I was able to do an npm install with success."

I'll get back to the next question later. :)

Hey,

I typed in npm init and I get this:
Teebling:~ teebling$ npm init
This utility will walk you through creating a package.json file.
It only covers the most common items, and tries to guess sensible defaults.

Press ^C at any time to quit.
package name: (teebling) npm install blizzard.js --save
Sorry, name can only contain URL-friendly characters.

I don't really know what this tool wants me to do, nor do I know what a package.json file is for.

I'll get back to the next question later. :)

From the blizz forums:
You don't want to have a jQuery or any kind of javascript doing the request to the API directly. You just can't do that without exposing the API token to the user browser. You have to implement some kind of endpoint on your server to proxy those requests.

Will this js framework (if I ever manage to get it installed lol) create an endpoint to proxy the requests? Or is that something else I'll have to do later?

Have you checked this page - https://develop.battle.net/documentation/guides/getting-started ? See section "Making API requests" there is an example how to retrieve token with a simple curl request, and then making the request - that's usually how I start playing with stuff like this. Then you can quickly see if you can get the responses you're looking for.

About the security aspect and the endpoint I have no idea - I guess you just have to dig into the documentation. But you can save the blizzard.js stuff until later and start with the curl requests first to get started quicker.

Have you checked this page - https://develop.battle.net/documentation/guides/getting-started ? See section "Making API requests" there is an example how to retrieve token with a simple curl request, and then making the request - that's usually how I start playing with stuff like this. Then you can quickly see if you can get the responses you're looking for.

I just tried it with curl in the command line and successfully got a response. It went like this:

Requested an access token
Received access token
Added that access token to the end of my query
Received data I wanted from the server

So that's a start. However, I need this to work on my website, not from me typing into the command line! Hoping this .JS framework will do this for me.

At least you know that you can achieve what you want, that's good. Maybe there's more examples on the blizz dev site - I guess you need to dive in there and try to find something useful.

Few notes that might help:

There are two oauth flows that I see for blizzard APIs:

Authorization Code Flow - Involves setting the redirect uri and is not what you want. I usually think of this as sort of like "login with battle.net" where the authorization is actually passed to the resource provider (Blizzard). The user then gets a notice on oauth.battle.net or whatever it is (the user temporarily leaves your site) saying "hey an application is trying to access your username, wow characters and etc., do you want to allow this? If so go ahead and login and we will send the application back a code they can use to get this info". This is where the redirect uri comes in, battle.net has to know where to send the user (and authorization code) back to on your website. This isn't what you want: its UI driven.

Client Credentials Flow - This is what you want since you aren't looking for any protected endpoints (personal account data etc.). Luckily this is quite simple, you simply tell battle.net you are an authorized application developer using your client id and client secret and then will immediately get back an access token which you send as a header:

Authorization: Bearer {access_token}

to your endpoint:

https://us.api.blizzard.com/wow/realm/status

You should be able to then do this with two ajax requests, the first to get the access token from

https://us.battle.net/oauth/token

and the second to the realm status using the access token. Big problem there though is that your client id and client secret will be visible. So that is a long-winded response only to ask:

Have you considered making a simple PHP wrapper which handles fetching the data and then just spits it out? Just like https://api.barrens.chat/realms which takes care of all of the oauth silliness and then you can just simply request it using ajax?

Here is an example or you could use a fancy oauth library :smile: :


<?php

?>



array(1) {
["realms"]=>
array(246) {
[0]=>
array(10) {
["type"]=>
string(6) "normal"
["population"]=>
string(3) "n/a"
["queue"]=>
bool(false)
["status"]=>
bool(true)
["name"]=>
string(7) "Aegwynn"
["slug"]=>
string(7) "aegwynn"
["battlegroup"]=>
string(9) "Vengeance"
["locale"]=>
string(5) "en_US"
["timezone"]=>
string(15) "America/Chicago"
["connected_realms"]=>
array(5) {
[0]=>
string(11) "daggerspine"
[1]=>
string(10) "bonechewer"
[2]=>
string(9) "gurubashi"
[3]=>
string(6) "hakkar"
[4]=>
string(7) "aegwynn"
}
}
[1]=>
array(10) {
["type"]=>
string(6) "normal"
["population"]=>
string(4) "high"
["queue"]=>
bool(false)
["status"]=>
bool(true)
["name"]=>
string(10) "Aerie Peak"
["slug"]=>
string(10) "aerie-peak"
["battlegroup"]=>
string(11) "Vindication"
["locale"]=>
string(5) "en_US"
["timezone"]=>
string(19) "America/Los_Angeles"
["connected_realms"]=>
array(1) {
[0]=>
string(10) "aerie-peak"
}
}, ...
}
}

Hey teebling, so, I totally understand your frustration. I was also a kid that got started back in the CSS2 days and upon returning to the fray about 5 years ago the amount of tooling and things that had changed was absolutely insane. It's also largely why I sort of left the frontend world. :razz: Technology changes incredibly fast, and the JS world is basically a new universe every year due to how fast it's changing and breaking things. REST has been around a while, but the ways in which people interface with APIs has changed. Cookies, OAuth2, JWT tokens, etc. It changes based on flavors of the month and what people are familiar with.

So Node.js is not a library, it's a runtime built on the V8 engine. To make that easier to understand: you know what PHP does? Nodejs does that -- but uses JavaScript as its language of understanding and compiles that into machine code, whereas PHP goes into C++ and then machine code in order to accomplish what it is doing. You also don't need apache2/nginx to run on top of that like you do for PHP, though many still do for the great benefits of web servers like nginx, but you can in theory just route all your traffic using Node frameworks like Express.

npm is Node Package Manager -- it's like composer is in PHP. So you can't install something with it and use it on a webpage normally -- it goes into the whole Node thing. Since you're using phpBB there's pretty much zero chance you're going to be utilizing Node.js in any way here. This concept took me a while to wrap my head around too when I was just learning this stuff. I couldn't understand how JavaScript was a backend language now... but well... it is, lol. I really dislike it, but some love it.

So, like Anders kindly explained, you can try to accomplish this within phpBB if you have enough experience writing extensions or modifying phpBB a lot -- but I honestly am not sure that's the best idea. That goes a bit outside of the realm of what the forum software should be doing, in my opinion. The best bet is to actually write you own personal API whether in JavaScript, PHP, or Go! and make a simple way to interface it from here with a super simple request. Cache the data in the API to internally update every 15 minutes or so to prevent each request spamming Blizzard. You can then also build upon this and extend it with new features that are then super easy to crunch numbers, do calculations or other misc. stuff and have simple ways to grab it with ajax requests on the forums.

However, it seems that that may go a bit outside what you're familiar with? If you'd like, despite me being a bit busy, I totally don't mind building this for you. I am a backend developer that has a ton of experience building APIs and making integration with 3rd party ones. I would enjoy doing this, and have been looking for an excuse to work with the Blizzard API.

Anders you may be on to something here!

I've been working at this all day and found out some new stuff. Like you say, and I've had some help from other people on this too, the JS option just doesn't work due to the ID/Secret being visible etc. Also my web host don't support node.js (which all the oauth frameworks are dependent on now). So PHP seems like the better option.

I'm going to give your PHP script a try - would be awesome if this worked. Will report back soon :smile: thanks so much for the help so far.

Awesome, as Henhouse said if you want to get more stuff in the future you will need something quite a bit more robust, public api.barrens.chat github??!?! :razz: