TF2 Trading Bot

TF2 Trading Bot is a fully automated trading bot built to work seamlessly with the tf2-automatic platform. The bot listens for events from tf2-automatic, processes trade offers, manages inventory, and handles listings using bptf-manager for backpack.tf interactions.

The bot leverages my bptf-autopricer application to provide accurate and competitive real-time pricing data. Together, these components form a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for TF2 trade automation, being designed with dual usage in mind.

To set up the bot, you will need to configure the following:

• tf2-automatic bot
• tf2-automatic bot manager
• bptf-manager
• bptf-autopricer

Detailed instructions on setting up these requirements will be provided further down.

Features

⚡ Blazing Fast Trade Processing

• The bot processes trade offers quickly, ensuring minimal delay in evaluating and responding to incoming trade events. This allows for efficient and timely trades.
• Processes incoming trade offers, using pricing data from bptf-autopricer to determine whether a trade is favourable or not.

🛒 Listing Management

• Create, Delete, and Update Listings: The bot manages backpack.tf listings based on real-time trade events, ensuring items are listed or removed accordingly.

⚙️ Automatic Metal Crafting

• The bot crafts metal automatically after each trade to maintain configured minimum metal amounts.

🤖 Integration with bptf-autopricer

• The bot integrates seamlessly with my battle-tested bptf-autopricer application to provide accurate and competitive pricing. This ensures that the bot stays up-to-date with current market trends and can evaluate trade offers effectively.
• Additionally, bptf-autopricer serves as the central interface for managing the bot’s inventory preferences. Users can easily add or remove items to buy and sell (and have them autopriced) directly through bptf-autopricer, streamlining the pricelist configuration process.

🔑 Autokeys

• Automatically creates buy and sell listings for keys based on the number of keys and refined metal in your inventory.
  • E.g., A key listing will be created selling n keys when the bot has n keys over its configured maximum amount and less than its minimum refined metal amount.
• Minimum and maximums are fully configurable via the autokeys.json config file.

💰 Partial Pricing for Minimum Profit

• Protects against selling an item for less than the price it was bought for, particularly in response to changing market conditions. The bot adjusts the selling price to the item's purchase price plus 1 scrap (0.11 refined).
• The duration an item remains "partially priced" can be configured in the partialPricing.json config file.

❌ Trade Validation and User Ban Checking

• Rejects trade offers from banned users, ensuring that the bot does not get banned through interacting with these known bad-actors.

📦 Inventory Management

• Tracks "in-use" items during active trades, preventing them from being used for crafting or other trades. Thereby ensuring trades are less likely to become invalidated through items being traded away before an offer is accepted.

📉 Stock Limit

• Currently, the bot will only hold 1 of each item at a time, maintaining a stock limit of 1.
• This is a static limit because I originally made this bot for my personal use, and found it to be a good set-up. However, feel free to edit the code to change this.

bptf-autopricer

For more details regarding the pricer, visit my bptf-autopricer GitHub project page.

Setup Instructions for bptf-autopricer

Official setup instructions for bptf-autopricer can be found in the README.MD file on the GitHub project page.

Docker & Docker Compose

The tf2-automatic applications are distributed via docker files, which require docker to run.

On Windows, you can download and use Docker Desktop.

On Linux, you can follow this wiki.

Guidance on how to run containers (docker-compose.yml files) can be viewed here.

Managing Listings with bptf-manager

The bptf-manager application, provided by the tf2-automatic platform, manages backpack.tf listings. The bot communicates with this application to create, delete, and update listings based on trade activity and pricing updates.

Setup Instructions for bptf-manager

1. The official setup for bptf-manager can be found in the tf2-automatic repository using the recommended Docker Compose setup here.
2. Alternatively (and what I would recommend), you can use the custom Docker Compose setup I provide, which ensures that bptf-manager is only accessible to the local network for added security:
   • Custom Docker Compose File for bptf-manager

Steam Account Interface via TF2-Automatic Bot & Bot Manager

The bot and bot manager applications from the tf2-automatic platform must be set up and running for the tf2-trading-bot to function properly. These tf2-automatic applications provide crucial events that this application listens for and acts upon, they also provide an API to perform actions like accepting or declining trades.

Setup Instructions for tf2-automatic Bot and Bot Manager

• The recommended Docker setup for these tf2-automatic applications can be found in its official repository. Simply download, configure, and run the Docker Compose file.
• Alternatively (and what I would recommend), you can use the Custom Docker Compose File for tf2-automatic Bot and Bot Manager I provide, which ensures that the bot manager and bot applications are only accessible to the local network for added security.

Setup

Prerequisites

Before downloading & setting up the TF2 Trading Bot, make sure you have the following installed:

1. Node.js (LTS Version)
   The bot is built on Node.js. You need the LTS (Long Term Support) version.
   Install from Node.js (or via a package manager if on Linux) and verify the installation:

2. NPM
   NPM is bundled with Node.js, and you need it to install dependencies for the bot. Verify it’s installed:

   npm --version
   

3. PostgreSQL
   The bot requires a PostgreSQL database to store data. Install the database, the exact method changes depending on your operating system, so refer to an external guide for this.

4. Git You need Git to clone the repository. On Windows install from the Git website, on Linux based systems, I believe it comes pre-installed. To verify that its installed run:

   git --version

Download & Installation

Before continuing, make sure you have correctly configured, downloaded, and are able to run the tf2automatic bot, manager, and bptf-manager applications. Furthermore, ensure you have installed and configured the bptf-autopricer and followed all its set-up instructions, e.g., the database set-up.

---

Now that all the prerequisites are met both in terms of applications required and packages, we can clone the tf2-trading-bot git repository from within a terminal using the command:

git clone https://github.com/jack-richards/tf2-trading-bot.git

Next we move into the new directory and run:

npm install

This will download all the npm packages required by tf2-trading-bot.

Then run the following command to build the TypeScript project:

npm run build

You should find a newly created /dist directory.

The application requires a PostgreSQL database called trading_bot with a schema called tf2. If you correctly followed the set-up instructions for the bptf-autopricer project, these requirements should already be met.

At this point you need to adjust the config files within the /config directory. See the section below for more information.

Configuration

You will need to configure the JSON files contained within the /config folder. Each file contains placeholders most of which can be left the same but some will need changing e.g., database password.

I will not cover config files here that are entirely self-explanatory.

1. autokeys.json

This file controls the key-related settings. You can modify the values or leave them as the default:

{
  "minKeys": 20,
  "maxKeys": 200,
  "minRef": 200,
  "maxRef": 400
}

• minKeys: Minimum number of keys the bot will attempt to have at a given time.
• maxKeys: Maximum number of keys the bot will hold, with the overflow being sold based on whether more refined is needed or not.
• minRef: Minimum amount of refined metal the bot will attempt to have at a given time.
• maxRef: Maximum amount of refined metal the bot will hold, with the overflow being potentially used to buy keys if required.

2. bot.json

{
  "steamid": "your bots steam id 64",
  "token": "your bots bptf token",
  "apiKey": "your bots bptf api key",
  "userAgent": "",
  "host": "127.0.0.1",
  "port": 9876,
  "buyDetails": "Buying %amount% %item% for %price%.",
  "sellDetails": "Selling %amount% %item% for %price%."
}

• steamid: Your bot's Steam64 ID.
• token: Backpack.tf API token.
• apiKey: Backpack.tf API key.
• host and port: Local server details for communication. If following standard set-up should leave this as default.
• buyDetails and sellDetails: Message templates for listings.
  • %amount% = amount of the item the bot is selling or buying.
  • %item% = the name of the item.
  • %price% = the price of the item in keys and ref.
  • For example, if the bot was selling a Team Captain, it would state: Selling 1 Team Captain for 22 refined.

3. crafting.json

This file defines crafting rules for the bot. Modify as needed:

{
  "minScrap": 12,
  "minReclaimed": 12
}

• minScrap: Amount of scrap we want to maintain at a minimum in our inventory.
• minReclaimed: Amount of reclaimed we want to maintain at a minimum in our inventory.

4. database.json

This file contains the database connection settings. Update the connection details to match your PostgreSQL configuration:

{
  "schema": "tf2",
  "host": "localhost",
  "port": 5432,
  "name": "trading_bot",
  "user": "postgres",
  "password": "your database password"
}

Note that we are using the same schema as the one used in the bptf-autopricer project. If you have followed the setup instructions for that project, you should already have the schema tf2 created, same with the database trading_bot.

5. mptf.json

{
  "apiKey": "your marketplace.tf api key"
}

• apiKey: If you are a seller on marketplace.tf an API key should be available to you. This is used to check whether a user we're trading with is banned on marketplace.tf or not.
  • If you are not a seller and can't provide an API key, leave this field blank like shown below:

{
    "apiKey": ""
}

6. partialPricing.json

{
  "partialPricingMaxAgeInDays": 7
}

• partialPricingMaxAgeInDays: Maximum age in days a item will be partially priced for.

Running the Trading Bot

Now that the bot is configured, re-run the build command in the top-level of the project:

npm run build

Launch the bot, bot manager and bptf-autopricer applications.

After, change directories within the terminal to dist/src/, here you should find the file app.js, the entry-point to the application.

To launch the tf2-trading-bot run:

node app.js

As an alternative to running the application directly with node, I would recommend using PM2, once it has been installed run:

pm2 start app.js

When you run:

pm2 list

You should see the trading bot as one of the processes, you can shut it down with pm2 stop [application name] or pm2 delete [application name]

How to add items to buy & sell?

Simply add the item to be priced by the bptf-autopricer application through one of the methods shown here.

⭐ Show Your Support

If you find the project useful, please consider leaving a star! ⭐