MobMash

This project aims to unravel the answer to the gargantuan query of existential magnitude: Which is the best Minecraft mob?

Visitors are prompted with two mobs and should decide which one they like better. After they choose, the "looser" is replaced with a new candidate. In the background, an Elo-style rating system is keeping track of the individual matches. The rating also determines the next candidate - similar ratings are paired up. Within one session, pairings are not repeated.

I posted a deep-dive on how the rating system is implemented over on my blog.

Tech Stack

• Chart.js (MIT)
• HTMX (0-Clause BSD)
• PHP
• PostgreSQL

Credits

Minecraft content and materials are trademarks and copyrights of Mojang Studios.

The mob names and images are fetched from the Minecraft Wiki (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). - Thank you for letting me use your API!

The font used is the Minecraft Font by JDGraphics (Public Domain). The icons are Font Awesome v4.7.0 (OFL-1.1 & MIT). The emoji are Twemoji (CC BY 4.0 & MIT).

Contribution

Issues and Pull Requests are always welcome!

Local Development

With Docker

The easiest way to develop locally is using Docker and Docker Compose. Just execute:

cd local-dev
docker compose up --build

This will start a PostgreSQL server and a PHP dev container. The working directory is mounted in the container. So, for PHP changes, you don't need to rebuild the container. However, for JS changes or new emojis (emoji.css) you will either have to rebuild the container, or execute the build scripts manually (see "Without Docker") below.

Without Docker

If you don't want to use Docker, you need a PostgreSQL database, a PHP 8 interpreter, and npm. If you don't have a local web server, you can just use the built-in PHP development server: php -S localhost:8080 -t ./html/

As for configuration, just copy ./config.templ.php to ./config.php, fill out the values, and you are ready to go.

The migrations are automatically applied with the first served request.

To compile the JS, execute:

cd resources/js
npm install
npm run build

This will also download Font Awesome.

In order to download the emoji, execute ./bin/setup/fetch-emoji.sh. You'll have to repeat this whenever you add new emoji to emoji.css.

You will also have to run ./bin/cron/updateData.php to create the mob entries in the database and fetch the images. The other files in the ./bin/cron/ are not necessary for most development work, as they will just some cleanup and caching stuff for production.