SquidBots

A live dashboard for an AzerothCore realm full of bots — where they are, what they are doing, what they kill, say and find, and whether the server held up while you slept.

Built for Conquest of Azeroth with mod-playerbots (branch coa); a plain AzerothCore realm works too. It reads the game database and the worldserver's logs, never writes to the database, and runs on the Python that ships with the repack: no framework, no build step, no package to install, no request to any outside site.

It comes in two versions from the same code: a private one on localhost with everything, including the bot settings, and a public copy of plain files you can put on any web server.

What you get

World — the headline figures, each continent's map with every bot on it (click a zone for its own map, a bot for its card), and the bot you follow, live: the page at the top of this file.

Bots	Stats
Every bot online, sortable and filterable: class, specialization, zone, what it is doing right now, health.	Hunting pace, factions and roles, busiest zones, today against yesterday, bots on the floor, level spread, stuck bots and crashes, experience per hour, leaderboard, spells cast, class ranking.
Chat & Loot	Settings (private version only)
The live chat feed (private version; searchable, every 5 s), the most talkative bots, and the epics and rares they find.	The bot settings that matter, in plain words, with a warning when another setting cancels one out, and one-click recipes such as CoA Bots v1.4: the recommended settings.

PvP — battlegrounds by type (games, wins per side, objectives, killing blows), arenas by bracket (fights, average and median length), classes in battlegrounds and arenas, the top arena teams, and the High Risk and War Mode characters, over the last 24 hours and since a date you pick (pvpSince in dashboard.json; without it, the whole history). No character is named: a team keeps its name only when all its members are random bots, otherwise it shows as a players' team.

The bots' chat language, on the Chat & Loot page (private version): what bots say on their own in the channels, in say and in whispers comes from the server's translated lines (AiPlayerbot.BotTextLocale). Pick Auto (the players' game client), English, Français, Deutsch, Español or Русский; it applies when the game server restarts. No AI involved.

Every bot has a card. Click it on the map, in the list or through the search box: class and specialization, what it is doing (Fighting Blackhand Thug, Questing: Border Crossings, Dead, running back...), its health and power, its group, its quests and what it said lately.

The live part — task, health, power, position to the second — comes from bot-status.json, which mod-playerbots writes when AiPlayerbot.CoaStatusFile is set (see Live status). Without it the card falls back to the last character save: alive or dead, online or not.

English and French. Dark theme. The Cinzel font is bundled under the SIL Open Font License (static/fonts/OFL.txt).

Install

Needs Python 3.9 or later and the mysql client binary.

1. Copy squidbots.py, botconfig.py, index.html, worldmap.json, static/ and dashboard.example.json into a folder (tools/ too if you want the real maps).
2. Rename the example to dashboard.json and fill in your paths. Keep your database password out of it: point mysqlArgs at a MySQL client file, or drop the folder inside a repack that has Settings/database.json. A second realm on the same MySQL names its own databases with "databases": {"auth": ..., "characters": ..., "world": ...}.
3. Run python squidbots.py and open http://localhost:8088 (or the port you set).

Two versions: private and public

Private is the dashboard itself, on http://localhost. It has everything: Settings, the live chat feed with every channel, memory, crashes and the watch journal. The server listens on 127.0.0.1 only, answers only requests addressed to that name (so a web page cannot rebind its own name onto it), and accepts a write only as JSON from its own page (so another site cannot post a form to it).

Public is what publishDir receives for a web server to serve: plain files (index.html, static/, worldmap.json, maps/, stats.json once a minute, live.json every 12 s) and no process anyone can reach. It is built, not filtered:

• stats.json carries only the keys listed in PUBLIC_KEYS in squidbots.py. A figure added later stays private until it is listed there.
• Never public: what real players say (no line of chat at all; "most talkative" counts bots only), memory, crashes, the watch journal, paths, configuration, errors.
• live.json carries only the bot fields the map and cards show (PUBLIC_LIVE_FIELDS), and no real player's name: a group led by a player loses its leader's name, a fight with a player reads "Fighting a player".
• The page's private code sits between private:start and private:end markers and is removed from the public files, not hidden. Publishing stops if anything private is left in them.

On another PC of your network

The dashboard listens on this machine only (http://localhost:8088). To open it from another PC of your home network, add a second port to dashboard.json:

"lanPort": 8089

Then open http://<the server PC's address>:8089 on the other PC (for example http://<this-pc-address>:8089). This port serves the public version, read-only: the map, bots, stats, chat counts, loot and PvP pages, without the Settings page, the real players' chat and whispers, paths or crash details. Settings are still changed on the server PC itself, at localhost:8088. Windows Firewall asks once whether Python may accept connections: allow it for private networks only. "lanListen": "<this-pc-address>" limits the port to one network card.

Logs some cards need

Add these to worldserver.conf and restart; until then the cards stay empty and say so.

Spells cast, and rare finds (both need mod-playerbots on the coa branch):

Appender.CoaBots = 2,4,1,CoaBots.log,a
Logger.playerbots.coa = 4,CoaBots
Appender.BotLoot = 2,4,1,BotLoot.log,a
Logger.playerbots.loot = 4,BotLoot

Chat feed and most talkative: the bots' own lines (the module writes them, since a bot sends no chat packet), and the players' chat if you want it too (stock AzerothCore):

Appender.Chat = 2,4,1,Chat.log,a
Logger.playerbots.chat = 4,Chat
# optional, the players' chat:
ChatLog.Enable = 1
Logger.chat.say = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.yell = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.channel = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.whisper = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.party = 4,Chat
Logger.chat.guild = 4,Chat

The PvP page's battlegrounds need Battleground.StoreStatistics.Enable = 1.

The Chat & Loot and PvP pages offer a Turn the journals on button when these lines are missing: it sets the required ones in place, after a backup of worldserver.conf.

The Settings page

It changes values in the module .conf files (playerbots.conf, dynamicxp.conf, and mod_bot_minds.conf when mod-bot-minds is installed). It edits values in place and never reorders lines; the only line it may add is the bots' chat language, at the end of playerbots.conf, when an older file lacks it. It backs the whole file up to config-backups/ first. Each setting says when a change takes effect. The server reads these files at startup, so it is easiest to use with the server stopped. Writes are accepted from the machine itself only, from the dashboard's own page. The dashboard never writes to the game database.

Armory

The Armory page finds any character, bot or player, by the start of its name and opens its sheet: the gear in the game's paper-doll order with quality colours, item level and a tooltip (damage, stats, enchantment, gems), the average item level, stats, professions and the latest achievements. Links such as #armory/Name open a sheet directly. It is on the dashboard's own page, so also in the CoA Server Manager's "Dashboard" tab (which shows that page); the public copy and the LAN page leave it out.

It reads the same databases with the same mysql client as the other pages, read-only; a typed name is letters (one space at most) and is sent as a hex literal, never pasted into the query. Names of enchantments, gems, suffixes, professions and achievements come from the server's data/dbc folder (dbcDir, found on its own in a repack); without it, the sheet shows numbers ("Achievement #6") and says so.

Item icons, in this order:

1. The icon's name for the item's look: world.itemdisplayinfo_dbc (InventoryIcon_1; Conquest of Azeroth's own looks are there), else ItemDisplayInfo.dbc in the dbc folder.
2. The picture from a game client on this PC: gameClient in dashboard.json, else a client found beside the repack, in a usual install folder or one or two folders under a local disk's root (one holding Data/common.MPQ). Each icon is read the first time a sheet shows it and kept in icons/ (git-ignored, Blizzard's art, never published).
3. Otherwise the browser loads it from https://wow.zamimg.com/images/wow/icons/large/<name>.jpg. Custom CoA icons are not there: those items keep their quality-coloured frame. "webIcons": false in dashboard.json turns this step off, so that the page asks no outside site for anything.

Stats are the server's own when PlayerSave.Stats.MinLevel is above 0 in worldserver.conf; otherwise the sheet adds up the gear and says so. Nothing new is needed from the module.

Map

worldmap.json (rebuilt by tools/gen_worldmap.py) gives the map its zones out of the box: each zone is a rectangle in world coordinates, with the bots as dots.

For the real continent and zone maps, press Extract maps (above the map, or under Settings) and give your game client folder. In about two minutes they are written to maps/ (about 70 MB), with nothing to install. The same from a terminal:

python tools/gen_art.py --client C:\my-client --dbc C:\my-server\server\data\dbc

In the CoA Bots repack the dashboard is CoA-Bots\Tools\Dashboard, with its tools folder, and the map works at once with the zone outlines. For the real maps, press Extract maps above the map and give the folder of your game client (the one holding Data\common.MPQ), or run from CoA-Bots\Tools\Dashboard, with the repack's own Python:

..\..\..\Runtime\python\python.exe -B tools\gen_art.py --client "C:\path\to\your\client" --dbc ..\..\..\Data\dbc

then reload the page. The maps are taken from your own client, so the release does not ship them.

The maps are Blizzard's and are git-ignored. With publishDir set, they are copied beside the public page (about 70 MB, only new or changed files), so the public map looks like the local one; without publishDir they never leave your machine. No other game art (interface, frames, icons) is used.

Live status

Bots are placed from their last character save. For live positions, and for what each bot is doing on its card (health, power, task, group, quests), let mod-playerbots write a bot-status.json every few seconds and point botStatusFile in dashboard.json at it:

# configs/modules/playerbots.conf
AiPlayerbot.CoaStatusFile = "C:/my-server/server/logs/bot-status.json"
AiPlayerbot.CoaStatusIntervalSeconds = 5

It is off by default. With 1000 bots online a snapshot costs under a millisecond of the world update, and the disk write runs on a thread of its own. A file older than 60 s is treated as stale (the server has stopped writing it).

The watchman

watch-and-restart.ps1 checks the worldserver every minute and restarts it after a crash or a freeze (a log untouched for five minutes), capturing thread stacks before killing a frozen one.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File watch-and-restart.ps1 -Server C:\my-server\server

Its journal shows in the Stats page (incidentsLog). Once an hour it trims Chat.log in place to the last 24 hours (-TrimLogs, -TrimHours, -TrimEveryMinutes). Discord alerts are opt-in: put a webhook URL in alerte-discord.txt next to the script.

Notes

• Figures follow PlayerSaveInterval: a kill shows when the character is saved. Rates use a sliding half hour for that reason.
• baseline.json, history.json and xp-history.json are written next to the script; delete baseline.json to restart the "gained since" figures.
• footer in the settings replaces the page's footer line; "" removes it.

Contributors

A big thank you to Sass42, whose pull request #1 turned a single page of figures into the dashboard you see above: the side navigation and its five pages, the continent and zone maps with the bots on them, the bot cards, the sortable roster, the live chat feed, the Settings page with its explanations, override warnings and recipes, and the tool that extracts the maps from your own client with nothing to install. The live bot status on the cards grew out of their work too. Thank you!

Pull requests are welcome.

Credits

• jealous-sound for Conquest of Azeroth
• mod-playerbots for the bots
• Sass42 for the pages, the maps, the bot cards, the chat feed and the Settings page
• Written with Claude Code; reviewed, tested and run on a real server with a thousand bots.