warcraftAuctionHouseInfo

A free replacement for the paid TradeSkillMaster Desktop App. Pulls WoW auction data from Blizzard's public API and feeds it straight into TSM's in-game AddOn — no subscription, no login, no server.

Why this exists

TSM's in-game AddOn is a genuinely great piece of free software. The paywall sits around the one part that's purely a data pipe — and it's a data pipe around information Blizzard publishes for free to anyone who asks. There's no technical reason that needs to cost money.

This project gives that part away. Forever. With no ads, no upsells, no "pro version," no accounts, and no server to keep online. It's small enough that one person can maintain it, and simple enough that anyone with a text editor can read and audit the whole thing.

It's also fully decentralized — there is no central server anywhere, no hosted database, no shared user pool. Every person who installs this runs their own copy with their own Blizzard key and their own local data. If this project's maintainer disappears tomorrow, every existing install keeps working unchanged. That's not a bug, it's the whole point.

What you get

• → Drop-in replacement for the TSM Desktop App. Works with the same in-game AddOn you already use.
• → One small file — a single executable, no installer, no runtime to download, no system changes.
• → Retail, Classic Era, and Hardcore supported from day one.
• → Zero cost, zero tracking — no accounts, no telemetry, no uploads. Your auction data never leaves your computer.
• → Stats that improve over time — day one gives you current prices and hourly averages. After a week you have seven-day history. After ninety days you have the full set of long-range statistics TSM power users rely on.
• → Public domain — released under CC0. Take it, fork it, rename it, ship your own version. No strings.

How it works

Blizzard runs a public data service for developers. It speaks the same language every modern website uses — you ask it a question, it answers with a structured reply. Anyone can sign up for a free developer account in under five minutes and start asking questions.

One of the things you can ask is "what's currently for sale on this auction house?" Blizzard replies with the full list — every item, every listing, every price — updated about once an hour. This is exactly what the TSM Desktop App asks for on your behalf.

This tool does the same thing, but locally on your machine with your own key. It saves a running history of what it sees in a small database file next to itself, computes the same kinds of statistics TSM computes — the current floor price, a rolling average of reasonable sale prices, how many are listed, how rare an item is becoming — and writes it all out to the exact file TSM's in-game AddOn already loads every time you launch WoW.

Stack

• Language: Go 1.22+, pure-Go toolchain (no CGO). Single static Windows binary with no runtime dependency.
• Storage: SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite — pure Go, no system libraries, trivial cross-compile.
• Auth: OAuth2 client credentials grant against oauth.battle.net/token. Bearer token cached in-memory per run.
• Data source: Blizzard Game Data APIs — connected-realm auctions endpoint, region commodities endpoint (retail), classic auction house endpoints (Alliance/Horde/Neutral).
• Output: Lua file dropped into Interface/AddOns/TradeSkillMaster_AppHelper/AppData.lua, written atomically via temp-file-and-rename.
• Config: TOML. Client ID, client secret, realm list, WoW install path(s).
• Scheduling: Out of scope for v1 — user wires up Windows Task Scheduler. Binary is stateless between runs beyond SQLite.

Data flow per run

1. Load config. Parse TOML into typed structs, validate realm slugs and paths.
2. Acquire OAuth2 bearer token from oauth.battle.net/token.
3. For each configured realm: fetch the connected-realm auctions endpoint (retail) or the classic auction house endpoint, plus the region-wide commodities endpoint once per region for retail.
4. Normalize each auction row to {itemString, buyoutPerUnit, quantity}. Skip bids-only listings. Collapse stack listings into per-unit prices.
5. Compute per-item statistics from the current snapshot: min buyout, market value (mean of the lowest 15% of per-unit prices — TSM's documented method), total auctions, total quantity.
6. Insert snapshot rows into SQLite with scanned_at = now(). Prune rows older than 91 days at the start of each run.
7. Query rolling windows from SQLite (24h, 7d, 14d, 90d) to compute historical averages per item. Emit zero for windows without sufficient history.
8. Serialize to Lua matching the LoadData format TSM_AppHelper's loader accepts.
9. Write atomically via temp file + os.Rename. Exit zero with a summary log line.

Item string encoding

TSM identifies items with a compact string format. Simple items are i:<itemId>. Gear with bonus IDs (warforged, socketed, crafted tiers) extends to i:<itemId>::<bonus1>:<bonus2>:.... Dragonflight-era crafting quality uses modifier tuples. Battle pets are p:<speciesId>:<level>:<quality>.

Blizzard's auction response includes item.id, item.bonus_lists[], item.modifiers[], and item.pet_species_id. The encoder walks these and produces the canonical TSM string. v1 implements the simple and bonus-ID paths; pets and full crafting modifier support are deferred to v1.1.

Scope