Tag: eventsub

Twitch to Discord Notifications

This post is about a thing I built that has been public for a while, but I never wrote up a blog post about it.

A common question that comes up in various places, is “How do I notify my Discord that my Twitch Stream went live”, so since I had some time and wanted to build a demo project that shows people how do to that, since it’s a common thing, it’s easier to point people to an example.

I decided to build BarryCarlyon’s Super Simple Discord Notifications Platform.

It’s a super simple implementation of Twitch EventSub to notify a Discord Channel that a Twitch Stream has gone live.

The long and short of it is fairly straight forward

  • a Twitch EventSub message arrives into server
  • the Server parses that message
  • the Server checks if the target channel is live or not (just in case it’s a duplicate message)
  • if the checks pass, build a Discord Webhook message
  • Send that message to the linked Discord Channel via Discord Webhooks

The project is fully open source and licensed under “WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License” and can be found at the following places

The live version of the project only allows the logged in Twitch user to link their Twitch to a Discord, so you can’t login as you and say “I want to know when Lirik goes live”, this means that my EventSub cost is zero since you logged in as you and only looking to notify for your own stream. So I fit easily into the EventSub limit since the cost is zero. If you were cloning the project/logic to use your own ClientID then you don’t need to worry about getting auth since you probably are not gonna link 3000 or so streamers go lives into the same Discord channel!

So in summary, check out the Project, use it for your own stream/discord if you want, or borrow the logic flow from GitHub to do your own stuff with EventSub to Discord. And as always all feature requests and suggestions welcome! It was already requested to allow a Customised Discord message to support new/multiple lines in the message and that went in last week!

How does Twitch’s new EventSub work?

Preamble

In the beginning, Twitch created Webhooks. And the world rejoiced, finally we no longer have to long poll for things such as followers! Hurrah! But it came with a gotcha, since Twitch Webhooks is based on the Websub specification, each and every Webhook you wanted to listen to had to be renewed, now this is limited to 10 days (max) or the time remainging on the Token you authenticate with (when asking to listen to priviledge topics such as subscribers), which generally meant you had to remake certain subscriptions every 4 hours, after of course renewing the token with the refresh token. Since the maximum length of a Twitch user token is 4 hours. (Implicit tokens use 60 days, but you can’t refresh those).

This wasn’t a good solution for developers, since it creates siginificant load, and “wasting” of your rate limits with Helix. Even more so when working with multiiple streamers.

Twitch has acknowledged this as a problem, which leads us to the new product of EventSub.

Aside from ignoring the need to remake your subscriptions periodically, EventSub also doesn’t need a correspoding Helix endpoint to exist for the topic you wish to listen on (this also means a different format for the data payloads), and means EventSub can make new topic types without waiting for Helix to create the endpoint first.

So, now onwards to the meat of this post!

EventSub, hows does it work?

The long and short of it, is that everything is sent via HTTP Post requests, to your SSL protected endpoint.

Unlike Webhooks, Eventsub only authenticates using App Access Tokens (for server to server requests), but how does this work when you are attempting subscribe to a channels new Subscribers topic, or the Ban/timeout events topics?

Authentication

Well, when you make a subscription request to EventSub, Twitch looks at your App Access token, then checks in the background if the requested broadcaster has connected to your Application at any point, with the relevant scopes, and not revoked that connection.

So, it’s a “two legged” approach to authentication. But means that you, the developer, don’t need to store the broadcasters access or refresh tokens, after they have authorised. though you generally would in order to perform “catch up” if your application goes offline/restarts for any reason.

Infrastructure

So to utilise EventSub, you need to create a portal that allows broadcasters to grant access to your Application to their account with the relevant scopes, using “regular” User Authentication.

Then on authentication you check/create eventsub subscriptions as needed, using your App Access Token. You should also store and use the returned User Acces token for use on catchups

And you need a server that can recieve HTTP Posts from Twitch for verification of the connection and accepting data payloads. (Generlly here you’ll HTTP 2xx OK as quickly as possible and send the data into background processes.

TLDR: for example if you can call Get Broadcaster Subscriptions (at the moment you obtained the Access Token) then your ClientID can subscribe to the channel.subscribe EventSub.

Summary

Hopefully this should help out anyone that is new to EventSub or getting involved with the Twitch Channel Points Hackathon.

Since many people may look at EventSub to recieve new Channel point redemptions but might trip up over the initial authentication setup.

There are a number of examples on my GitHub that might help, but if you need any further help, please join us on the TwitchDev Discord Server!

Just thought I would write up this post with a ramble of notes on how EventSub Authentication works, since theres gonna be a spike in people asking and probably getting stuck if they are new to working with Twitch.

Twitch API Examples

I spend a lot of time on the Twitch Developer forums and Discord helping out other third party developers. That among other things led to me being asked to become a Twitch Ambassador, which is probably a story for another post.

As part of spending a lot of time helping of Forums/Discord, it become useful to write up some examples in various languages for people to refer to, since some people prefer code examples over documentation, and it’s easier to demonstrate how to tie multiple calls/endpoints together for the desired result.

To that end my GitHub Repo at barrycarlyon/twitch_misc now exists and holds examples from Authentication flows (from Implicit to server access and regular user in-between), extension config/pubsub, and examples for Webhooks and the new Eventsub (which is worth a look!). So if you are looking for some examples do checkout the Repository. Some of the examples can even be tested on GitHub itself via GitHub pages, the examples available are listed in the readme and at the Github Pages site.

Twitch also recently made the requirement that all calls to helix (aka the New API) need to be Authenticated using a Bearer, which made it difficult for Extensions to get the viewers details. So to that end I created a basic example of how to do that in an Extension with a “User Profile Extension” example. Which is at BarryCarlyon/twitch_profile_extension. So this covers a good way to handle that flow.

Right now most of the examples are nodeJS, or PHP, but there are some in Python kicking about!

I’ll be looking at adding more examples and other examples in other languages as we go!

I’m usually really bad at commenting my code as I prefer reading the code, but I made a conscious effort to add useful code comments on these repos!