twitch-research

Twitch research

Resolve Twitch channels, games/categories, and teams, and pull live status, clips, VODs, VOD chat replay, schedules, and search results as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API — no Twitch developer app, no OAuth, no scraping.

When to use this skill

"Is live right now, and what are they playing?"
"Get the top clips from ."
"What did chat say during ?" / VOD chat replay lookups.
"What's 's upcoming schedule?"
"Who's live in <game/category> right now?" or top games site-wide.
"Who's on 's roster, and who's currently live?"
"Search Twitch for a channel or category."

Setup (one-time)

Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

Resolve the channel login. A Twitch URL https://twitch.tv/<login> gives the channel login directly (it's already the lowercase URL slug) — no separate id-lookup step is needed.
Profile + live status: /twitch/channel login=<login>.
Content for that channel: /twitch/clips login=<login> (recent clips), /twitch/videos login=<login> (VODs), /twitch/schedule channel=<login> (upcoming broadcasts).
VOD chat: once you have a VOD id (from /twitch/videos or a twitch.tv/videos/{id} URL), page through its chat replay with /twitch/vod-comments video=<id>, advancing offset from the last comment's offset_seconds to keep paginating.
Team rosters: /twitch/team team=<slug> for a team's members and who's currently live.
Discovery (no channel needed up front): /twitch/search query=<text> to find channels/games by name; /twitch/top-games for what's trending site-wide; /twitch/streams game=<slug> for the top live streams under one game/category.

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Channel profile + live status:
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/channel login=caedrel | jq '.'

# Clips and VODs for a channel:
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/clips login=caedrel limit=10 | jq '.data'
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/videos login=lck limit=10 | jq '.'

# Top games, then top streams under one:
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/top-games limit=10 | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/streams game=league-of-legends limit=10 | jq '.'

# VOD chat replay, paginating by offset_seconds:
scripts/crawlora.sh /twitch/vod-comments video=1234567890 offset=0 | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for every Twitch endpoint this skill uses (method, path, params, description).

Examples

Channel digest: /twitch/channel (live status) + /twitch/clips + /twitch/schedule for one login → a single "what's this streamer up to" summary.
VOD moment-finder: /twitch/videos to find the VOD id → /twitch/vod-comments starting at offset=0, paging forward by the last comment's offset_seconds → scan chat for reactions around a timestamp.
Category browse: /twitch/top-games for the top categories → /twitch/streams game=<slug> on the one of interest → surface the top live streamers under it by viewer count.

Notes & limits

Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
Public data only — public Twitch pages/GraphQL surface; respect Twitch's terms.
Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
login/channel params are the lowercase URL slug (e.g. caedrel for twitch.tv/caedrel), not a display name — lowercase before calling.
/twitch/schedule returns an empty segments list, not an error, when a channel has no schedule configured.
/twitch/search is sourced from Twitch's search-typeahead surface — a capped suggestion list (limit max 30), not a fully paginated results page.
/twitch/vod-comments paginates by re-requesting with offset set to the last returned comment's offset_seconds — there's no separate page token.