Creating a Discord bot with cookiecutter

LordOfPolls — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 12:57:42 +0000

Preamble

Let's get a bot running as quick as possible. For this we're going to use cookiecutter and NAFF. Cookiecutter will build us an oven-ready project, and NAFF will facilitate using the Discord API.

Disclaimer

This tutorial does not aim to teach you how to program a bot, purely how to use cookiecutter to build a NAFF project. Check out the other guides in this series for that.

Let's get started

First, let's get cookiecutter installed:

>$ python3 -m pip install cookiecutter

And now let's build our project.

>$ cookiecutter https://github.com/NAFTeam/Bot-Template
< There will now be a couple of terminal prompts to help you set up your personalised discord bot
----------------------------------------------
Arguments:
'project_name' - The name of your project
'project_slug' - A formatted version of your project name, which is used as a filepath and for the docker container names
'license' - What license your project should have. Can be safely ignored should you not plan on openly publishing this project on the internet
'license_organization' - The name that should appear on the license
'load_debug_commands' - If some helpful debug commands should be loaded. These will only be accessible to the owner of the bot
'discord_token' - Your discord bot token. This will not be pushed if your use this project with git
----------------------------------------------
Press 'Enter' to start
]:

From here, answer the questions, and when you're done, your project will be ready.

< project_name [New Discord Bot]: 
>$ test project
< project_slug [test-project]: 
>$ test-project
< Select license:
1 - MIT
2 - BSD-3
3 - GNU GPL v3.0
4 - Apache Software License 2.0
Choose from 1, 2, 3, 4 [1]: 
>$ 1
< license_organization [Your Name]: 
>$ LordOfPolls
< Select load_debug_commands:
1 - true
2 - false
Choose from 1, 2 [1]: 
>$ 1
< discord_token [changethis]: 
>$ [your_token_here]

You now have this project structure:

test-project
├───core
└───extensions

core contains the bot itself, logging, and an extension loader. extensions holds all of your extensions which will be automatically loaded thanks to the extension loader.

From here, you can run the bot by running this:

>$ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
>$ python3 main.py

Have a look around, and enjoy developing your bot! If you want more info, check out NAFFs Docs or one of the other guides in this series.

Making a NAFF Discord Bot

LordOfPolls — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 10:14:24 +0000

Preamble

So you fancy making your own bot for Discord? Got a fun idea for your community? Well let's get you started.

For this tutorial I'll be using the python library NAFF.

I'm going to skip past creating a Discord bot on the Developer Portal. If you're unsure check out this guide.

Environment

As with any python project, I strongly recommend that you make use of Virtual Environments when working on any project. This means that each project will not affect anything else on your system. Don't worry, this isn't setting up a full-fledged virtual machine, just small python environment.

cd "[your bots directory]"
python3 -m venv venv-name

# Linux
source venv/bin/activate
# Windows
venv/Scripts/activate

It's that simple, now you're using a virtual environment. When you're donme, just type deactivate. If you want to learn more about virtual environments, check out this page

Installation

Installing python libraries is really easy! Just type this command and you're good to go

python3 -m pip install naff

Basic Bot

Let's make something really simple first, we just want to connect to Discord, and say we've logged in.

import naff

bot = naff.Client()


@naff.listen()
async def on_ready():
    print(f"Logged in as {bot.user.username}")

bot.start("your_bot_token_here")

Now just run your code, and you should see it login!

Commands

Its pretty boring to only see a logged in message, it would be nice to actually have commands; so lets do that now.

For this, we're going to add a ping slash command to the code we just wrote.

import naff

bot = naff.Client()


@naff.listen()
async def on_ready():
    print(f"Logged in as {bot.user.username}")

@naff.slash_command("ping", description="A ping command", scopes=[some_guild_id])
async def ping(ctx: naff.InteractionContext):
    await ctx.send("Pong")

bot.start("your_bot_token_here")

Lets break down that decorator. @naff.slash_command tells NAFF the coroutine is a command. From there you have these parameters

Name - The first parameter, this is the name of the command, here it is "ping"
Description - When a user views commands, this is the help text they'll see
Scopes - These are the guilds this command will be available in, by default they are available everywhere. For testing its recommended to use a testing guild as it will update faster, and keep your mistakes secret 😉

There are some more parameters you can play with, but those can be left for a future guide

And there you have it, now you have a NAFF powered discord bot with slash commands. just start the bot and type /ping in your guild!

DEV Community: LordOfPolls

Creating a Discord bot with cookiecutter

Preamble

Disclaimer

Let's get started

Making a NAFF Discord Bot

Preamble

Environment

Installation

Basic Bot

Commands