Free Games Crawler

This is a crawler that extracts information about free games from multiple storefronts. This is meant to be used as the crawler for discord-free-games-notifier but can be used alongside any consumer that can connect to Redis.

Currently supported storefronts:

• Epic Games
• Steam

This service is meant to be used as a trigger for services that can act upon receiving new free game offers. It leverages Redis for storing current offers and Redis PubSub for publishing new offers found to a PubSub channel.

Services that consume this information should connect to the Redis instance and subscribe to the offers PubSub channel to receive updates. Message payloads are JSON strings that should be parsed by the consumer.

Consumers can also fetch stored offers in Redis. Since there aren't many free game offers at a given time, you may use KEYS to get all the offers. Offer keys follow the format offer:STORE_FRONT:GAME_ID, for example, for the game Drawful 2 the key would be offer:Steam:442070.

Game offers are stored as JSON strings in the following format:

{
  "storefront": string,
  "id": string,
  "url": string,
  "title": string,
  "description": string,
  "type": 'game' | 'dlc' | 'bundle' | 'other',
  "publisher": string | null
  "original_price": number | null,
  "original_price_fmt": string | null,
  "thumbnail": string | null
}

For example, for the game Drawful 2, you can expect the following payload:

{
  "storefront": "Steam",
  "id": "442070",
  "url": "https://store.steampowered.com/app/442070/Drawful_2/?snr=1_7_7_2300_150_1",
  "title": "Drawful 2",
  "description": "For 3-8 players and an audience of thousands! Your phones or tablets are your controllers! The game of terrible drawings and hilariously wrong answers.",
  "type": "game",
  "publisher": "Jackbox Games",
  "original_price": 5.79,
  "original_price_fmt": "$5.79 USD",
  "thumbnail": "https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/442070/header.jpg?t=1721927113"
}

Usage

In order to use this project you'll need the following:

• Redis
• Doker (Recommended) or Python

With Docker (Recommended)

Create a docker-compose.yml file with the following:

services:
  crawler:
    image: ghcr.io/moonstar-x/free-games-crawler:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - redis
    environment:
      REDIS_URI: redis://redis:6379

  redis:
    image: redis:7.4-rc2-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 6379:6379

You can also the image moonstarx/free-games-crawler:latest if you prefer DockerHub.

And that's it, the crawler container will scrape all the supported storefronts every 30 minutes and save the information acquired data in Redis.

With Python

Make sure to have at least Python 3.8.

First, clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/moonstar-x/free-games-crawler

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

And start the crawler:

REDIS_URI=redis://localhost:6379 python3 main.py

This assumes you have a Redis instance running on localhost.

Configuration

You can configure the crawler with the following environment variables.

Name	Required	Default	Description
REDIS_URI	Yes		The Redis instance URI. (i.e redis://localhost:6379)
REDIS_TTL	No	7200	The amount of seconds the stored information will last for in Redis.
SCHEDULER_EVERY_SECONDS	No	1800	The amount of seconds the crawler will wait before running again.
CRAWLER_HTTP_REQUEST_TIMEOUT	No	0	The amount of seconds the crawler should wait before making an HTTP request.
CRAWLER_HTTP_MAX_RETRIES	No	10	The amount of times the crawler can repeat an HTTP request before giving up.
CRAWLER_HTTP_RETRY_TIMEOUT	No	0.5	The amount of seconds the crawler should wait before retrying failed HTTP requests.
THREADING_ENABLED	No	true	Whether crawlers should run in multiple threads or not.
THREADING_MAX_WORKERS	No	auto	The amount of threads that can be used to run each crawler. Set this to a specific positive number or auto to let Python decide based on CPU core count.

Development

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/moonstar-x/free-games-crawler

Create a new Python environment:

python3 -m venv ./venv

Load the environment:

source ./venv/bin/activate

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

And create the development environment:

cd _dev && docker compose up

Testing

You can run unit tests by using:

pytest test

Or, if you wish to have test watch enabled:

ptw test

Building

To build this project you should use Docker

To build the image locally, you can run:

docker build -t test/free-games-crawler .  

And to run it:

docker run -it --rm --network host -e REDIS_URI=redis://localhost:6379 test/free-games-crawler