Twitch Team Auto Shoutouts Setup

November 2, 2021GrantComments

Writing a resource to help out my fellow Team Brisk members get auto shoutouts working on their channel. Hopefully this is fairly straightforward and easy to follow. Reach out to me if you get stuck and I can help out.

This guide is written with Windows in mind. Most of the same steps apply on MacOS, there’s just a slightly different initial setup to get NVM installed. If you’re on MacOS and need further instructions let me know and I’ll revisit this with more info

This bot needs to be actively running on a computer for it to work on your stream. It does not need to be the same computer that runs your stream, but that may be the most logical option in the majority of cases.

What you need

• Windows Terminal – Download from the Windows Store
• The Twitch Shoutout Bot Code – Download from GitHub (Click the Green Code button -> Download Zip)
• NVM Windows – Download from GitHub (Scroll down and grab to nvm-setup.zip file)
• Text Editor – Notepad will work if you don’t want to download anything else but I’d recommend downloading VSCode and using that

Environment Setup Steps

1. Ensure Windows Terminal is installed from the Windows Store and run the installers for NVM Windows and VSCode (optional)
   
2. From the Start menu, find Windows Terminal, right click it and select Run as Administrator (This is only required on initial setup. In the future you can start Windows Terminal just by clicking on it)
   
   
   
3. Run the command (ie type/paste in the command and press enter) below to install NVM. It should take a minute or two to install.
   
   nvm install lts
   
   
4. Once it completes it should provide the next command to enter in order to use that nvm version. It should look something like the following. Copy and paste that into the terminal. NOTE: You may have a different set of numbers to my example
   
   nvm use 14.17.6
   
   
5. If all went well you should be presented with a message saying something like “Now using node v14.17.6 (64-bit)” and we can proceed to configuring the bot

Twitch Bot Config

Before we get started configuring the bot you’ll need to decide whether you’d prefer the shoutouts messages in chat to come from your own account or whether you’d like to create a separate twitch account to be your bot account and have the messages come from there. Having the messages come from your own account is quicker to setup but you may prefer to keep things separate so it’s easy for viewers to tells what’s a bot message.

1. If you’d like to have the messages come from a second account go ahead and create a new twitch account with the name you’d like your bot to have (if you already have a bot account from something else you can use that). Tip: if you’d prefer to use the same email for both accounts there’s an option to allow that on your Security page of your primary account. Also, it may be worth opening an incognito window or a different internet browser so you can have both twitch accounts available during setup. Lastly, you’ll need to setup 2FA on the bot account as well before it can be automated to send messages.
   
2. Unzip the Twitch Shoutout Bot at a convenient location on your system where you won’t forget it, but also won’t accidentally move/delete it. For this tutorial we’re going to assume that they are located in this folder: C:\Users\%yourname%\Documents\TwitchShoutoutBot\
   It should look like this:
   
   
   
3. Rename the .env.sample file to .env
   
   
   
4. Right click the .env file and click “Open with Code” if you installed VSCode. Otherwise you can Open with Notepad
   
5. We need to populate this file with some parameters to tell the bot how it can access the account to send messages and what channel we’re sending the messages to. Lets go through these in order
   
   TWITCH_OAUTH_TOKEN – For this we need to go the https://twitchapps.com/tmi/ and follow the prompts to generate the oauth code. NOTE: if you’re using a secondary twitch account for the bot you need to do this in the browser logged into the bot account, not your primary account. The result should be something like oauth:abcasd92mac2cma2msa2n
   
   TWITCH_CLIENT_ID – This is set to the following value: q6batx0epp608isickayubi39itsckt
   BOT_USERNAME – This is set to the username of the account sending the messages. If you’re sending from your primary account you’d enter that (ie. gforce_aus). If you’ve set up a bot account use that (ie. gforce_bot)
   CHANNEL_NAME – Your twitch channel for the bot to post in (ie. gforce_aus)
   CHANNEL_ID – Your twitch channel ID used to prevent the bot from shouting out yourself. To find this, enter your primary twitch username into This Tool and copy the ID
   
6. Once complete your file should look like this:
   
   
   
7. Now we just need to tell the bot what teams we’re looking to shoutout and what we want to say. For that, inside the src folder edit the config.js file
   
8. By default, the bot will trigger a shoutout for each unique team member every hour. To change that, you can adjust the SHOUTOUT_TIMEOUT_MS value. (For example, changing the 1000 to 2000 would make it every 2 hours).
   
   SHOUTOUT_TIMEOUT_MS: 60 * 60 * 2000, // 2 hours,
   
   
9. Now we need to set the teams to check, and what text include when a member from that team is shouted out. If you’re only a member of Team Brisk you can use the following:
   
   teams: {
teambrisk: 'Team Brisk 🎶',
},
   
   meanwhile, if you have a second or additional team you want to monitor and shoutout you can add them as well. You’ll need the teamname as it appears in the twitch team URL for this. For example, lets do https://www.twitch.tv/team/ravestylezkrew
   
   teams: {
teambrisk: 'Team Brisk 🎶',
  ravestylezkrew: 'RaveStylez Krew 🎵',
},
   
   In both cases, you can edit the text between the quotation marks if you want to remove the emoji or add something else in there.
   
10. Lastly we need to configure our message to send. You’ll see the default message there already but you’ll likely want to change this to suit your channel and personality. Make sure you keep the ` marks at the start and end to mark the message. The ${variables} will be subbed out for the relevant information when the bot runs.
    
11. Once complete you should have a file that looks something like this:
    
    
    
12. Save those changes and we should be all set to run the bot

Running the bot for the first time

1. Open Windows Terminal
2. We need to navigate to where the bot files are to be able to run them. The easiest way to grab that path is to click it into it in file explorer and copy the path
   
   
3. In windows terminal we are going to navigate there by using the change directory command (cd) followed by our path we’re pasting in. So it should look something like:
   
   cd C:\Users\grant\Documents\TwitchShoutoutBot
   
4. The bot needs some additional code to run which we’re going to install by typing in the following:
   
   npm i
   
5. This will take a minute or two to run, just let it do its thing
6. We’re ready to go, now we can start our bot by entering
   
   npm start
   
7. If all went well you’ll likely see a whole slew of team member names and IDs fly down the page which means the bot has loaded in the names of all your team members and is ready to shoutout. Just leave the windows terminal window open to keep the bot running.
8. Get someone on your team to verify the bot is working by sending a message in your chat.
9. ????
10. Profit
    

Running the bot

With all the setup done and your bot working the steps to start it again if you close the terminal window are a bit quicker. When you’re going to stream and want to start the bot you can follow these steps:

1. Open Windows Terminal
2. Navigate to your Twitch Bot Folder
   
   cd C:\Users\grant\Documents\TwitchShoutoutBot
   
3. Start the bot
   
   npm start
   
4. Leave the window running until you’re ready to close the bot.
   
   
   

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, that process wasn’t too overwhelming for you. If you did get stuck anywhere reach out and I can point you in the right direction. Some final tips and tricks:

• For testing purposes you can stick a random number in the CHANNEL_ID field of the .env file. This will mean the bot will shout you out which can be useful for testing your message but you’ll want to put the correct ID back before you use it live.
• If you need to restart the bot (to reset the cooldown for testing or after changing the message) you can do so in Windows Terminal by pressing CTRL + C which will kill the command. You can press the up arrow in terminal to get your last command back which should be npm start which you can use to start the bot back up.