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About eris-fleet

Eris-fleet is a spin-off of eris-sharder and megane with extended functionality. Eris-fleet uses a core package wumpus-carrier with the primary clustering functionality.

eris-fleet currently supports Eris v0.17.x

For detailed documentation check the docs. Please read basics first to avoid getting lost in the documentation.

Note: The documentation page for this specific Discord library will only contain library-specific methods. General clustering methods (nearly all of the methods) are under the "wumpus-carrier" section in the documentation. Relevant links are there.

Highlighted Features:

• Clustering into many processes to use more cores
• Sharding
• Recalculate shards with minimal downtime
• Update a bot with minimal downtime using soft restarts
• Customizable logging
• Fetch data from across clusters easily
• Services (non-Eris workers)
• IPC to communicate between clusters, other clusters, and services
• Detailed stats collection
• Soft cluster and service restarts where the old worker is killed after the new one is ready
• Graceful shutdowns
• Central request handler
• Central data store
• Can use a modified version of the Eris client
• Concurrency support
• Fully typed for Typescript

A very basic diagram:

Help

If you still have questions, you can join the support server on Discord: Discord server

Installation

Run npm install eris-fleet or with yarn: yarn add eris-fleet.

Basics

Some working examples are in examples/.

Naming Conventions

"Fleet" and "Admiral" are used interchangeably as they were meant to be separate components which ended up being the same. The only time you encounter "Fleet" is when using new Fleet() (see examples below) which is actually just an alias for the "Admiral" class. This is unlikely to be updated as this naming caveat has persisted for too long.

Get Started

To get started, you will need at least 2 files:

1. Your file which will create the Fleet. This will be called "index.js" for now.
2. Your file containing your bot code. This will be called "bot.js" for now. This file will extend BaseClusterWorker

In the example below, the variable options is passed to the Admiral. Read the docs for what options you can pass.

Here is an example of index.js:

const { isMaster } = require('cluster');
const { Fleet } = require('eris-fleet');
const path = require('path');
const { inspect } = require('util');

require('dotenv').config();

const options = {
    path: path.join(__dirname, "./bot.js"),
    token: process.env.token
}

const Admiral = new Fleet(options);

if (isMaster) {
    // Code to only run for your master process
    Admiral.on('log', m => console.log(m));
    Admiral.on('debug', m => console.debug(m));
    Admiral.on('warn', m => console.warn(m));
    Admiral.on('error', m => console.error(inspect(m)));

    // Logs stats when they arrive
    Admiral.on('stats', m => console.log(m));
}
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This creates a new Admiral that will manage bot.js running in other workers.

The following is an example of bot.js. This contains a class which extends the BaseClusterWorker class. This new class can also be passed to the BotWorker option instead of using a file. If you pass this through options do not include the file path option.

const { BaseClusterWorker } = require('eris-fleet');

module.exports = class BotWorker extends BaseClusterWorker {
    constructor(setup) {
        // Do not delete this super.
        super(setup);

        this.bot.on('messageCreate', this.handleMessage.bind(this));

        // Demonstration of the properties the cluster has (Keep reading for info on IPC):
        this.ipc.log(this.workerID); // ID of the worker
        this.ipc.log(this.clusterID); // The ID of the cluster
    }

    async handleMessage(msg) {
        if (msg.content === "!ping" && !msg.author.bot) {
            this.bot.createMessage(msg.channel.id, "Pong!");
        }
    }

    handleCommand(dataSentInCommand) {
        // Optional function to return data from this cluster when requested
        return "hello!"
    }

    shutdown(done) {
        // Optional function to gracefully shutdown things if you need to.
        done(); // Use this function when you are done gracefully shutting down.
    }
}
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Make sure your bot file extends BaseClusterWorker and uses super()! The bot above will respond with "Pong!" when it receives the command "!ping".

Services

You can create services for your bot. Services are workers which do not interact directly with Eris. Services are useful for processing tasks, a central location to get the latest version of languages for your bot, custom statistics, and more! Read the IPC docs for what you can access and do with services. Note that services always start before the clusters. Clusters will only start after all the services have started.

To add a service, add the following to the options you pass to the Fleet constructor:

const options = {
    // Your other options...
    services: [{name: "myService", path: path.join(__dirname, "./service.js")}]
}
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Add a new array element for each service you want to register. Make sure each service has a unique name or else the Fleet will error. You may also pass a class instead of a path using ServiceWorker option. Do not use the path option if doing this.

Here is an example of service.js. This contains a class which extends the BaseServiceWorker class.

const { BaseServiceWorker } = require('eris-fleet');

module.exports = class ServiceWorker extends BaseServiceWorker {
    constructor(setup) {
        // Do not delete this super.
        super(setup);

        // Run this function when your service is ready for use. This MUST be run for the worker spawning to continue.
        this.serviceReady();

        // Demonstration of the properties the service has (Keep reading for info on IPC):
        this.ipc.log(this.workerID); // ID of the worker
        this.ipc.log(this.serviceName); // The name of the service

    }
    // This is the function which will handle commands
    async handleCommand(dataSentInCommand) {
        // Return a response if you want to respond
        return dataSentInCommand.smileyFace;
    }

    shutdown(done) {
        // Optional function to gracefully shutdown things if you need to.
        done(); // Use this function when you are done gracefully shutting down.
    }
}
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Make sure your service file extends BaseServiceWorker and uses super()! This service will simply return a value within an object sent to it within the command message called "smileyFace". Services can be used for much more than this though. To send a command to this service, you could use this:

const reply = await this.ipc.command("myService", {smileyFace: ":)"}, true);
this.bot.createMessage(msg.channel.id, reply);
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This command is being sent using the IPC. In this command, the first argument is the name of the service to send the command to, the second argument is the message to send it (in this case a simple object), and the third argument is whether you want a response (this will default to false unless you specify "true"). If you want a response, you must await the command or use .then().

Handling service errors

If you encounter an error while starting your service, run this.serviceStartingError('error here') instead of this.serviceReady(). Using this will report an error and restart the worker. Note that services always start before the clusters, so if your service keeps having starting errors your bot may be stuck. This obeys the maxRestarts option.

If you encounter an error when processing a command within your service, you can do the following to reject the promise:

// handleCommand function within the ServiceWorker class
async handleCommand(dataSentInCommand) {
    // Rejects the promise
    return {err: "Uh oh.. an error!"};
}
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Make sure this is an object following the structure above. If you wish to send an object as the error, nest it under the "err" property. Other properties will be ignored. When sending the command, you can do the following to deal with the error:

this.ipc.command("myService", {smileyFace: ":)"}, true).then((reply) => {
    // A successful response
    this.bot.createMessage(msg.channel.id, reply);
}).catch((e) => {
    // Do whatever you want with the error
    this.ipc.error(e);
});
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In-depth

Below is more in-depth documentation.

Fleet

Fleet options

Visit the docs for a complete list of options.

Fleet events

Visit the docs for a complete list of events.

Central Request Handler

The central request handler forwards Eris requests to the master process where the request is sent to a single Eris request handler instance. This helps to prevent 429 errors from occurring when you have x number of clusters keeping track of rate limiting separately. When a response is received, it is sent back to the cluster's Eris client.

Large Bots

If you are using a "very large bot," Discord's special gateway settings apply. Ensure your shard count is a multiple of the number set by Discord or set options.shards and options.guildsPerShard to "auto". You may also be able to use concurrency (see below).

If your bot is really large such that it spans many machines you can still use eris-fleet. However, no official way exists of doing this and possible configurations are very subjective. I suggest making an API which assigns first and last shards to separate Admirals and a service which connects to said central API to conduct IPC requests and management tasks. Your API would have to route requests accordingly. All IPC requests would be relayed through said central API. A central request handler can be created by replacing the Eris Client's request handler with your own which uses your central API. eris-fleet's central request handler uses Eris's so any modifications will be used. Stats and other info will have to be reported and combined through mentioned central API. You can try to adapt this for Kubernetes if wanted. This has not been tests as I have no reason to attempt it; it's just an idea.

Concurrency

eris-fleet supports concurrency by starting clusters at the same time based on your bot's max_concurrency value. The clusters are started together in groups. The max_concurrency value can be overridden with options.maxConcurrencyOverride. Ensure the number of clusters is a multiple of the number of shards being started on this instance ((last shard ID - first shard ID + 1) % clusters = 0). Also make sure the number of shards per cluster is greater than the max concurrency value if you want concurrency to occur across clusters (max concurrency % ((last shard ID - first shard ID + 1) / clusters) = 0). If not, Eris can still do concurrency on each cluster as per the concurrency buckets. If you would like to suppress the warning set options.maxConcurrencyOverride to 1.

Choose what to log

You can choose what to log by using the whatToLog property in the options object. You can choose either a whitelist or a blacklist of what to log. You can select what to log by using an array. The possible array elements are shown on the docs. Here is an example of choosing what to log:

const options = {
    // Your other options
    whatToLog: {
        // This will only log when the admiral starts, when clusters are ready, and when services are ready.
        whitelist: ['admiral_start', 'cluster_ready', 'service_ready']
    }
};
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Change whitelist to blacklist if you want to use a blacklist. Change the array as you wish. Errors and warnings will always be sent.

IPC

Clusters and services can use IPC to interact with other clusters, the Admiral, and services. Visit the IPC docs to view available methods. All things sent over IPC are serialized, meaning you cannot send functions and what not. Wumpus-carrier uses an in-built serialization function to serialize a few extra data types beyond the JSON methods. If you want to serialize more, you can create your own function and pass that data through the IPC functions.

Stats

Stats are given in this format.

Using a modified Eris client

You can use an extended Eris client by passing it to the customClient option.

const { Fleet } = require("eris-fleet");
const { Client } = require("eris");

class ModifiedClient extends Client {
    // etc etc
}

const options = {
    // other options
    customClient: ModifiedClient
}
const Admiral = new Fleet(options);
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Using ES Modules

Instead of using the file path, you can use ES Modules by passing your BotWorker class to options.BotWorker and your ServiceWorker class to ServiceWorker in the options.services array.