I’m building a Twitch chat bot using Java with the pircBot library. I need help figuring out how to fetch the current game title that a streamer is playing. When my bot joins a channel, I want it to detect what game is currently being streamed, like League of Legends or Minecraft. Is there a built-in function in pircBot that can grab this data? If not, what’s the best approach to get the game information from a specific Twitch channel?
yeah, pircBot itself doesn’t handle game info. it’s best to use the twitch api for that. i set up a system that checks the current game every few mins with the helix api. just be careful of rate limits or you could get blocked!
Unfortunately, pircBot lacks built-in methods for fetching game information since it focuses on IRC chat functionalities. To retrieve the game currently being streamed, you’ll have to use Twitch’s API. Specifically, the “Get Streams” endpoint can provide you with the current game data for active streams. You can achieve this with Java’s HttpURLConnection or a library like OkHttp. Don’t forget to register your application with Twitch to obtain the necessary client credentials for API access. From my experience, caching the game information and refreshing it at intervals is a more efficient approach than querying the API with every request. The response from the API includes a field named game_name, which contains the information you need.
I ran into this exact issue when developing my own Twitch bot last year. The solution involves integrating the Twitch Helix API alongside pircBot since IRC commands alone cannot access stream metadata. You’ll need to make HTTP requests to the streams endpoint using the broadcaster’s user ID. I recommend creating a separate service class that handles API calls and stores the game information in memory. Make sure to implement proper error handling for offline channels since the API returns empty data when streamers aren’t live. Also worth noting that you’ll need to handle OAuth token refresh automatically since tokens expire. The whole setup took me about a day to implement properly, but it works reliably once configured.