Nodejs Tool To Do Airdrops On Steem-Engine For Free

Project introduction

Repository: https://github.com/Rishi556/EngineAirdrop

What is it: An easy way to send airdrops to users on Steem-Engine for free with a little bit of knowledge of how to use Nodejs.

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Development

Development went by pretty well for the most part, except for a few things that I struggled with. This was only my second time making CLI tools with Nodejs and I couldn't figure a few things out.

The first problem I stumbled onto was that I couldn't get the CLI commands to work without being in the directory with the project. After googling some, I realized that I needed to have the WHOLE filepath for the files that I wanted to be read. As seen in this commit I changed it so that rather than just using the file's name, it has the whole file path.

var path = require('path').dirname(require.main.filename)
fs.readFile("./ToSend.txt", (err, data) => {
fs.readFile(`${path}/ToSend.txt`, (err, data) => {
//more code in here
})

It worked perfectly after changing it to that.

Another problem that I ran into was with Steem-Engine. I wanted to make sure that the account had enough tokens to send if it was transferring rather than issuing the token. I was trying to use the findOne method in ssc incorrectly. Glancing through the docs, I saw id and was trying to use that rather than account for the username. That just kept resulting in errors. After looking at the docs some more, I realized that I needed to use account, and that worked perfectly. Commit here.

By far the hardest problem I had was with the 3 second limit with STEEM. I could only broadcast a coustom_json once per block, and so needed to set a delay. So I decided to use setInterval which lets something occur every x. But I realized that I didn't know how to stop that. I googled about it and discovered I could use clearInterval to stop the interval from occurring anymore. With that I tried a few different ways, all involving a count variable that checks if it was greater than the length of all the people to send to and would clear the interval if it was. I started with an if statement inside the callback after sending the transaction to Steem, but that kept going no matter what. Other methods didn't work, until I decided to have an if-else statement before broadcasting that checked if the count variable was greater than the length and would only broadcast if it wasn't. That worked without flaws. Commit here.

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Usage

I tried to make usage as simple as possible. Everything is detailed in the readme, and so I've just copy pasted that onto here.

EngineAirdrop is a free tool for anyone to use to send airdrops to recipients on Steem-Engine.

To use this, simply clone this, cd to the directory and use npm i to install the dependencies.
Next use npm link to be able to use the command line interface for it.

Now edit the ToSend.txt file. Follow this format, each person should be on their own line, followed by a comma and how much they should receive,

username,amountToSend
username2,amountToSend2

There's an example of this within the file itself, or here : https://github.com/Rishi556/EngineAirdrop/blob/master/ToSend.txt.

Next edit the config.js file. There's four fields and you need to change each one to be correct for you. Theres instructions right next to each field if you have any questions.

Finally, you are ready to start.

You can see who'll get how much by typing in airdrop genList. Use this to confirm that each person is getting the correct amount and make the changes if necessary.

You can also use airdrop processList to make sure that all accounts are on steem. If an array with names is returned, those are the ones that don't have steem accounts.

airdrop help gives you the help menu.

When you are ready to send, you can use airdrop send to start the sending process. It takes some time and an estimate will be printed out for you. If there are any errors, they'll be printed out in human readable form.

Here's an example of it running with the config filled out for TROLL transfers with the sending to the users in the example ToSend file.

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Final Thoughts

I think that this will be quite useful for those who want to do airdrops with Steem-Engine. Halfway through writing this, I realized that Steem-Engine had a tool themselves for this, but theirs cost 20 ENG while this is free for those who understand how to use it. I was debating on wether or not to stop work on this, but decided I've come too far to stop now. Thats why there's a moderately large timegap between these two commits.

I also with that my code was a little bit cleaner. While I use functions to keep the chunks small, those can get quite messy. Avoiding pyramids of doom is also something I've been trying to get better at, and while its a lot better from some of my older code, I still think I can get better. Using return is a nice way to exit the function which is better than the if-else that I used to use.

Github Profile: https://github.com/Rishi556