Koalalorenzo's Twitch Meme Bot

This Twitch bot is capable to listen for !meme commands in a Twitch chat and generate on the fly memes to display as an overlay for OBS.

If you like it, please follow me on Twitch channel. Original source code available here

See it live here

Building

To build the code into a portable binary you need the following things installed

• GNU Make (brew install make, but it is often pre-installed)
• Go 1.16 (brew install golang)

After that you can run:

make clean build

and you will find all the files needed in the build directory. You can also cross compile for Raspberry Pi by running:

make clean build -e BUILD_TARGET=rpi

Usage

Start the Server locally

To start the server locally you can use the built binary as in the following exampoe:

./build/koalalorenzo-meme-generator --channel koalalorenzo

If you need more help feel free to run the command with --help flag. Have a look at it because you can customize things like display time and host address (default to: 0.0.0.0:8000).

OBS Setup

Once the server is listening and ready you can load a new Browser Source in OBS. The URL of the source should the one printed in the logs.

The size of the window can be arbitrary based on the custom images. I suggest to use:

• Width: 800
• Height: 600

By default this url will be http://localhost:8000/sv. If you are running on a different platform like Heroku or DigitalOcean please use the URL provided by those platforms.

Remember to have dibled the following options:

• Refresh browser when scene becomes active
• Shutdown source when not visible

The reason is this that this uses WebSockets and it is better to no have multiple listners at the same time (aka: reuse the same source by Copy Reference). In case of issues the web page should reconnect automagically

Adding files

You can add files any time into the assets directory (please note that the path of the directory can be customized using flags).

IMPORTANT: The file name convention is the following:

<meme>.<font-size>.<extension>

where:

• meme is the 1-word used after the !meme chat command to slect the image
• font-size is the size of the text that will be in the image, this is a value that depends on the size of the image. Test it!
• extension is the image format. It can be one of the following: gif, png, jpeg or jpg.

You can test the meme by running generate subcommand:

./build/koalalorenzo-meme-generator generate deal Dogs are cool, DEAL WITH IT

Chat usage

The server is connected to the Twitch Channel (IRC channel) using an anonymous client. Therefore is not capable of announcing himself in the chat.

If the server is running you should be able to use the bot by writing a message with the following syntax:

!meme <meme> <phrase to write...>

For example:

!meme pathetic Humans? Pathetic servants

Will display in the Browser source for a few seconds the following image:

WebHook usage

It is possible to set up a custom webhook that will queue memes and show them. This is useful if you want to hook up some other tools or manually generate memes without using the chat (ex: From Apple Shortcuts or from curl for testing).

By default the webhook is disabled, to enable it you can pass the flag --webhook-enable to true or set the env variable KTMG_WEBHOOK_ENABLE=true. This endpoint can be protected by basic http authentication. Please use --help flag to check all the options availalbe.

For example if I set the following env variables and run the app:

export KTMG_LOGLEVEL=debug
export KTMG_WEBHOOK_ENABLE=true
export KTMG_WEBHOOK_USERNAME=koalalorenzo
export KTMG_WEBHOOK_USERNAME=SuperSecretPassword
./build/koalalorenzo-meme-generator

I will then be able to queue memes to be generated on the fly by running http POST request to the endpoint /wh, like this:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/wh \
  -X POST --data '{ "kind":"pathetic", "text":"Humans? Pathetic servants"}' \
  -u koalalorenzo:SuperSecretPassword

Deploy on Heroku

To quickly deploy on Heroku you can click on the following button and follow the instructions:

Follow the instructions and remember to customize the twitch channel and display time as env variables.

Important: Please note that the name of the application will impact on the URL that will be used in the OBS Browser Source. Do not share this URL/address with anybody and try to keep it hard to find. (hint: try adding random characters in the name might help)

Important: Due to security restrictions on some browser, using HTTP instead of HTTPs in the OBS Browser Source URL will fix connectivity issues.

Docker usage

It is possible to run Lorenzo's Twitch Bot meme generator using Docker. The docker image is downloadable from the project GitLab Docker Registry

You can use both env variables as well as command line to configure the app:

docker run -p 8005:8005 registry.gitlab.com/koalalorenzo/twitch-meme-generator:latest

You can also mount the temporary directory (under path /tmp) to save the cache of generated memes, this will speed up future requests.

You can mount the /assets path to a custom directory path where you can drop the images that will be used as base for the memes.