I am trying to build a way to log all the times my friends and I are on our video game server. I found an api which returns a JSON file of online players given a server’s IP address.
I plan to receive a new JSON file every 30 seconds and then log player gaming sessions by figuring out when they get on and when they are no longer off.
The problem is that this is my first time using a database like this for my websites. I want to use (and will use) Golang to retrieve the JSON file and update my MySQL database of player logs.
PROBLEM: I have no freaking clue how to have my Golang file run every 30 seconds to update my database. I can get a simple program to grab data and update a local database easily, but I’m lost on how to get this to run on my website and to have it run every 30ish seconds 24/7. I’m used to CRUD with simple html forms and other things related to user input, but I’ve never thought of changing my database separately from website interactions
Is there a standard solution to my problem? Am I thinking about this all wrong? Do I make sense? Does God really exist!!?
You need a UNIX/Linux subsystem known as cron to do this. cron lets you rig a program to run at a specific interval on your machine.
Bluehost’s cron support lets you run php scripts. I don’t believe they support running other kinds of programs.
If you have some other always-on machine that runs your golang program, you can run it there. But, to do that, you will have to configure Bluehost to allow an external connection to your MySQL server so that program can connect. Ask their customers support people about that.
Pro tip: every 30 seconds may be too high an update frequency to use on a shared service like Bluehost. That kind of frequency is tricky to manage even if you completely control the server.