When will a match instance be deleted from the server?

[jakehsiao]

After a several hours, when enter the game with the same matchID, the game instance is still here.

Can the server automatically delete unactivated game instance?

[delucis]

Currently the server deletes a match when all players use the leave endpoint, making the room empty:

boardgame.io/src/server/api.ts

Lines 305 to 310 in d56728b

	if (Object.values(metadata.players).some(player => player.name)) {
	await db.setMetadata(matchID, metadata);
	} else {
	// remove room
	await db.wipe(matchID);
	}

In practice this may not happen reliably if a player closes a client before the leave request. It would probably be nice to add an option for some time-based clean-up now that matches contain updatedAt metadata and an option to disable auto-deletion.

[jakehsiao]

@delucis So could you please give me a specific way to make server automatically clean match instances every 24 hours?

[delucis]

I’ll leave the precise scheduling logic up to you — you could use a library like cron or node-schedule or perhaps just a setInterval call — but the basics would be something like the below.

Please be careful with this! If your database connector doesn’t support the where option, this would wipe all matches. In that case you would need to fetch each match one by one to check updatedAt manually.

// Create and run the server as usual.
const { Server } = require('boardgame.io/server');

const db =  new DbConnector();

const server = Server({
  games: [game1, game2, ...],
  db,
});

server.run(8000);

// Define clean-up method.
const day = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
const cleanStaleMatches = async () => {
  const weekAgo = Date.now() - 7 * day;
  // Retrieve matchIDs for matches unchanged for > 1 week.
  const staleMatchIDs = await db.listMatches({
    where: {
      updatedBefore: weekAgo,
    },
  });
  // Delete matches one-by-one. Could also use a queue or parallel system here.
  for (const id of staleMatchIDs) {
    await db.wipe(id);
  }
}

// Schedule clean-up.
setInterval(cleanStaleMatches, day);