[PHP] Code To Get The Member Count Via Discord API

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hey everyone,

 

I just wanted to post some code I used to make our Discord Tracker in PHP. Unfortunately, I was having issues trying to get the Discord member count of the server. The member_count field located in the API here would always return NULL regardless of the bot having proper privileges. I even setup a test bot along with a test Discord server and had issues as well. After doing research, I found others were having this issue as well. Therefore, I decided to make my own code to get the member count. The code basically loops through all members using this request and object. It was a little bit more complicated since there was a limit of 1000 members and you'd have to specify a GET parameter ("after") to continue the query from where we left off on the last request.

 

Anyways, here's the PHP code. Obviously, you need to change $guildID and $botToken to suit your needs.

 

// Please configure.
$guildID = '';
$botToken = '';

// Variables.
$going = true;
$after = 0;
$count = 0;

// Da loop.
while ($going)
{
	// Perform a GET request to the Discord API using the $guildID.
	$ch = curl_init('https://discordapp.com/api/guilds/' . $guildID . '/members?limit=1000&after=' . $after);
	
	// Set authorization token.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array('Authorization: Bot ' . $botToken));
	
	// We don't wanna return the headers ;)
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	
	// Yes..
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
	
	// Give $result the output.
	$result = curl_exec($ch);
	
	// Close the cURL handle.
	curl_close($ch);
	
	// Decode the results using JSON (since that's what it returns).
	$users = json_decode($result);
	
	// Check if it's valid.
	if ($users && is_array($users))
	{
		// Increase the count per request.
		$count += count($users);
		
		// If the amount is under 1000, we're done here.
		if (count($users) < 1000)
		{
			$going = false;
			
			// Not really needed since we set $going to false anyways, but just figured we'd put it there just in-case?
			break;
		}
		
		// Leave off with the last user ID from the results so it keeps going.
		$after = $users[999]->user->id;
	}
	else
	{
		// BREAKKKKKKKKKKKK!
		break;
	}
}

 

I know the code may be a bit sloppy, but it works well for my needs. Obviously, the higher the member count is on the Discord server, the longer the loop will last. So it may take a few seconds to execute it. If you start getting over 10K+ members in your Discord server, I'd ensure that you have a long timeout set for this script.

 

I hope this helps anyone having the same issue as I was  

 

Thank you!

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,927]

Looks like there's a race car at the end of your code

[Nick 1,249 / 17,847]

Thanks for sharing, @Roy!

 

Just a note: If you're trying to query a larger server, then you might get rate limited. The status code for rate limiting is 429 TOO MANY REQUESTS, so keep an eye out for that. Here's a link to Discord's documentation on their rate limiting.

 

You'd often choose to use a framework to avoid manually handling rate limits, but it'd be overkill here in my opinion.

[LilyShiro 54 / 1,421]

Simple method, but interesting bug -- I myself run my discord bot via lua (discordia) and the api for returning member_count returns correctly -- no need for iteration. I would look into the bug more and maybe attempt to look at how other discord API interfaces do it internally and reproduce it via PHP.