Discord bot tutorial

1. Prerequisites

Before you can start coding, you need to have five things:

• A Discord account
• A Discord server that you have enough access to, so you can connect bots
• A Discord application
• A Discord bot, with a token we'll use in phase 2
• Permissions granted for that server so that bot is able to read and write messages there

First two you can create in discord.com. The rest you can create in https://discord.com/developers/applications

Additionally, of course, you should already have Python 3.x set up the way you like it, and suitable IDE ready to go (See previous videos on this channel)

2. Start coding

I have added some libraries over time. In current version they can be found from requirements.txt file, so before you start, you can just do something like:

´´´ pip install requirements.txt ´´´

If you are playing with the very initial commits I've made, you can just do something like:

pip install python-dotenv discord.py

Then you need to create the .env file, and set it up like this:

BOT_TOKEN=

You can easily test if this part is working by running this code:

import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
load_dotenv()
print(os.environ['BOT_TOKEN'])

The rest you can pick up from https://discordpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

3. How to see earlier versions of the code? (AKA I'm following the video series, and want to see what you did in episode 2?)

Yes, I always push here the latest version of the code, so if you make a clone, that's what you get. If you want to see the earlier, simpler steps, fortunately that's rather easy.

You can list all the commits I've made like this:

git log

Once you see a commit you like, for example:

commit ed8c6e4b491ac0bf8b37f61bb1156362efdd34f2
Author: Arto Santala <crystoll@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Jan 29 14:50:55 2021 +0200

    Initial import. Basic bot going on

You can temporarily check it out by doing:

git checkout ed8c6

This takes you to detached head-state, but you can see the code so far, and can make your own version of it, or just study it, as you prefer. I have also tagged main episode parts so you can alternatively just do:

git checkout episode3

If you want to go back to latest version available in server, you can always do a:

git checkout -B main origin/main

4. How to run this as a module?

Now that we have refactored code under packages, it makes more sense to run this as a module. From command line it's rather easy:

python3 -m pomobot

For VSCode, I showed in pomobot series part 9 video, how to set it up. But short notes are:

• Go to Run - Add Configuration - Python - Python Module (module name: pomobot)
• Then to run this, you can either press F5, or go to Run - Start Debugging