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GameQuery

query.arkenbot.app — docs, the full game list, and a live demo you can point at your own server.

A dependency-free game server query library — read player counts, map, hostname, ping, and rules from one or many servers at once. It ships as two parallel ports that stay in lockstep: a PHP library (t0xicvybez/gamequery) and a Node/TypeScript library (@t0xicvybez/gamequery), with the same protocols, the same API, and the same results.

• Zero runtime dependencies. PHP runs on core streams (8.1+); Node runs on built-in dgram/net (18+). Nothing to require, nothing to audit.
• Concurrent by design. One event loop drives every server's query at once, so polling 25 servers takes about as long as the single slowest one — not the sum of all of them.
• 23 protocol families / 33 registered keys, covering A2S/Source, both Minecraft editions, FiveM, Palworld, the GameSpy and id Tech families, voice servers, and more (full table below).
• Never throws for an unreachable server. Every query returns a Result; offline servers come back with online = false and an error string.

Built by @t0xicVybez and used in production by ArkenBot.

Installation

PHP (Composer):

PHP (standalone, e.g. a shared webhost with no Composer): drop in the src/ folder and autoload.php, then require __DIR__ . '/autoload.php';.

Node / TypeScript:

Ships both ESM and CommonJS, so import and require() both work. See node/ for the TypeScript API and CLI details.

Quick start

PHP:

Just one server, or don't know the protocol? Skip the ceremony:

Node / TypeScript:

Result API

• Normalized accessors — name(), map(), players(), maxPlayers(), playerNames(), and playerList() (structured {name, score?, duration?}) — read the right field regardless of protocol. Raw fields remain on data.
• errorCode — a stable ErrorCode value on failures (TIMEOUT, UNREACHABLE, CONNECTION_CLOSED, AUTH_FAILED, PROTOCOL_ERROR, CONFIG_ERROR) — switch on it instead of matching the human error string.
• maxConcurrent — an optional third constructor arg caps how many sockets are open at once (new GameQuery(2000, 1, 256)); use it for large fleets.
• queryWithPortProbe() — try a base port plus offsets and return the first that answers (for Source games whose query port is offset from the game port).
• queryOne() — query a single server without the addServer()/process() ceremony.
• queryGame() / addGame() — query by game id ('rust', 'cs2', 'minecraft') instead of protocol; resolves the protocol + default port from a 53-game database (gameInfo() / GAMES expose it directly).
• gameInfo().gamePort — the port players join on, for games where it differs from the port that answers queries (Killing Floor 2 is queried on 27015 but joined on 7777). Advisory only and never queried — use it to show a correct connect address; it is omitted when both ports are the same.
• processStream() — an async iterator (PHP: a Generator) that yields each Result the moment its server answers, instead of waiting for the slowest.
• listServers() — discover Source/A2S servers via the Steam master server (returns ip:port strings to feed into addServer('source', …)).
• toArray() / toObject() — both serialize the result (the CLI's JSON shape).

Addresses accept IPv6 in bracket form ([::1]:27015). Every parser is fuzzed against malformed input, so a hostile or broken server reply can't crash it.

Results come back in add order, one per server. data holds whatever the protocol parsed — see each protocol class's parse() for its exact fields.

Supported protocols

23 protocol families / 33 registered keys, identical across both ports. Parenthesised keys are aliases or variants (e.g. source-players adds the player list, -info variants skip it).

A few protocols need extra input: Palworld and Terraria take an admin password / token, TeamSpeak 3 takes the voice port, and Assetto Corsa is queried on its HTTP port. Pass these through the per-server options bag — each protocol class's docblock lists the keys it reads.

Command-line interface

Both ports ship a gamequery CLI that emits JSON on stdout — handy for calling from any language, or from a shell:

The --batch form takes a JSON array and queries every entry concurrently. When a password is involved, keep it off the process table: pass it via the GAMEQUERY_PASSWORD env var or --password-stdin rather than a --password flag (which is visible to anything that can run ps). The CLI always exits 0 (check the online field) unless there's a usage error.

Architecture

The core idea: every game query protocol, however different its byte layout, is a linear conversation — send a packet, look at the reply, decide whether to send another. A protocol is just three methods (initialStep, nextStep, parse) describing that conversation; it never touches a socket. The transport layer owns every socket, timer, and retry and knows nothing about A2S or Minecraft specifically. That split is what keeps the concurrency engine small and makes adding a game a matter of writing one focused class.

Adding a protocol

1. Create the protocol class in both ports (src/Protocol/YourGame.php and node/src/protocol/YourGame.ts), extending AbstractProtocol.
2. Implement transport(), initialStep(), nextStep(), and parse(). See Source for a challenge/response example or Minecraft for a single-shot one.

3. Register it in both ProtocolRegistry files, or at runtime:

4. Add a crafted-packet test to both smoke suites.

No changes to the transport layer are ever needed for a new protocol. The PHP and Node ports must move together — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Address resolution: protocols whose request embeds the server's own numeric IP (SA-MP/open.mp) override requiresAddressResolution() to return true; the transport then resolves the host to an IPv4 address before initialStep() and exposes it via Server::address(). Protocols that don't opt in pay no cost.

Known limitations

Kept deliberately honest — these are the edges worth knowing about:

• A2S bzip2 decompression needs help in Node. Multi-datagram A2S_RULES replies are reassembled, and the rare bzip2-compressed variant is decompressed automatically in PHP (when the bz2 extension is present). Node has no built-in bzip2, so — to stay dependency-free — you supply one via Source.setBzip2Decompressor(fn); without it, a compressed reply degrades to partial data rather than failing.
• Minecraft pingMs is the status round trip. For the minecraft protocol, pingMs is the handshake + status round trip. If you want the protocol's dedicated 0x01 ping as a purer network latency, use minecraft-ping, which reports it as data.ping_ms (at the cost of one extra round trip).
• Palworld reads only, over Content-Length responses. The read-only info/players GET endpoints are implemented; the mutating admin actions (kick/ban/shutdown) are intentionally out of scope. Response completion relies on Content-Length (which Palworld's Go-based REST API always sends) and both requests share one keep-alive connection — a server configured to close after each request would yield info-only data rather than an error. Use palworld-info if you only need server info.

Testing

Generate the API reference with cd node && npm run docs (typedoc) and composer docs (phpDocumentor — needs the phpDocumentor phar on your PATH).

The unit suites are dependency-free assertions against hand-built, known-good protocol byte sequences — buffer round-tripping, A2S parsing (including the 2020 A2S_INFO challenge and the "Ship" info variant), challenge hand-offs, Minecraft JSON framing, Palworld auth, and a crafted-packet case for every protocol. No network needed; both suites must stay all-green, and every protocol change lands in both ports with matching tests.

The integration.php / integration.test.ts scripts are separate, network-dependent diagnostics: they query real public servers and print a table, never failing the process on an offline server. Point them at your own servers to smoke-test a protocol end to end.

License

@t0xicVybez

GameQuery is free software and stays that way. You can use it, modify it and contribute to it freely; if you distribute a modified version — including running one as a network service — you have to make your source available under the same licence. That's what keeps this project open rather than something somebody repackages and sells closed.

Every published release is AGPL. The pre-0.5.4 releases, which were MIT, have been withdrawn from npm, Packagist and GitHub, so the AGPL is the only licence GameQuery is distributed under.