Discord, for those who are unfamilar, is a free text and voice chatting platform. You will need a Discord account in order to make and interact with a bot. You can create an account free at their website. You can either use Discord through the Desktop Application or through the browser. Additionally, you will need Python 3.8 installed. You can download Python from here
In order to be able to code your bot, you will need to install the nextcord module. To do so, follow these steps.
1: Open up your computer's command line interface. For Windows, this is a program called Command Prompt (or Powershell if you would prefer). For Mac and Linux, this is called Terminal. 2: Execute the following command
pip install nextcord
If Python was installed correctly, you should see output that looks somewhat like (yours will probably look slightly different) to this:
Now that you are able to make a bot, you need to make a place for it to live. To get started, open up Discord and follow these steps:
1: Select the plus button at the bottom of your server list.
2: Select the "Create My Own" button.
3: Name the server whatever you want, and then click "Create"
You should now see a blank server in your server list!
Last step before coding; we have to tell Discord to make the bot account for us. Go to the Discord Developer Portal and follow these steps:
1: Select "New Application", and name your bot whatever you would like.
2: When the application is created, go to the "Bot" tab and select "Reset Token" or "Reveal Token"
3: Click on the "Copy" button that appears. This will copy the bot's Token to your clipboard, which is essentially the bot's username and password. Do not share this token with anyone else.
4: Create a text file and paste your bot's token into it for later.
Navigate back to your bot's Application page and follow these steps:
1: Select the OAuth2 tab
2: Under the URL generator tab, select "bot" in the scopes checklist
3: Select "Send Messages", "Read Message History", and "Add Reactions" in the bot permissions checklist that appears
4: Copy the URL it gives you, and paste it into your browser
5: From the list of servers, select the server you want to add the bot to, and then click "Authorize". If prompted, solve a CAPTCHA.
You should now see the bot in the member list, but it will say it is offline. To make it appear online, we have to actually code the bot's logic!
Now to write the bot. This lesson recommends using Python IDLE (which comes with your installation of Python) to code, but any IDE will work.
Create a new folder where you want your code to be, and then inside that folder create a new file called "bot.py".
The first step is to add the include statements. By default, Python can't access the nextcord module until we import it. Add import nextcord to the file. Additionally, we will also need the asyncio and datetime libraries, so add import asyncio and import random to the file.
Your file should now look like this:
import nextcord
import asyncio
import random
from nextcord.ext import commands
The next step is to set some variables which will describe the behavior of our bot, and then to create a nextcord bot object using these variables. Set the following variables below the import statements:
description = "my bot"
intents = nextcord.Intents.default()
intents.members = True
intents.message_content = True
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!", description=description, intents=intents)
These variables define some important information about our bot. The intents object describes which kind of events our bot will need to access. Setting intents.members and intents.message_content to True allows our bot to access the content of messages and see the members of a server.
The last line creates an object which serves as our bot. We pass a prefix, a short description of our bot, and the intents defined above to the Bot constructor, which tells nextcord how to configure our bot. The prefix is used to differentiate normal messages in the server, with messages directed towards our bot.
First, we need to have the bot awaken and perform actions when it sees that someone has sent a message. To do this, we will create a function called on_message.
Add this below the bot variable:
@bot.event
async def on_message(message):
await bot.process_commands(message)
This block of code will be run everytime our bot sees a message. The bot checks the beginning of the message's text, and sees if it starts with the prefix we defined earlier. If it does, the process_commands function handles the rest of the message. This function is built into nextcord, so we don't have to worry about writing it ourselves.
The process_commands function is going to look for functionality we add to the bot based on the user's input. For example, we can create a simple command !ping to which our bot will respond pong. In this case, each command is added using a decorator which adds the function below it to the bot object.
To add this command, add the following code:
@bot.command() # <- decorator
async def ping(ctx): # <- function
await ctx.send("pong")
This command is very basic, as stated above. When the function gets called, the bot looks up what channel the command message was sent in, and then sends its own message to the same channel, making it look like the bot has responded! Before we can test this though, we have to have our bot log in!
At the end or your file, add the following lines of code
file = open("TOKEN.txt",'r')
TOKEN = file.read()
bot.run(TOKEN)
These lines of code will open up a file that contains the bot's token, and then connect the bot to Discord's servers. It is not super important to understand how all this code works. However, we need to create the TOKEN.txt file! Go to the folder you made earlier, and create a new file named TOKEN.txt. Inside this file, paste in your bot's token that you copied from your Discord Developer Page. If you have done so correctly, you can run your bot!
Run your bot, go to the new server you made, and type !ping. Your bot should respond with pong.
To catch up, your code should look like this:
import nextcord
import random
import asyncio
from nextcord.ext import commands
description = "my bot"
intents = nextcord.Intents.default()
intents.members = True
intents.message_content = True
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!", description=description, intents=intents)
@bot.event
async def on_message(message):
await bot.process_commands(message)
@bot.comand()
async def ping(ctx):
await ctx.send("pong")
file = open("TOKEN.txt",'r')
TOKEN = file.read()
bot.run(TOKEN)
There are 3 more commands we want to add, the first of which is a Magic 8 Ball!
Let's implement the function:
@bot.command()
async def eightball(ctx):
RESPONSES = [
"Yes",
"No",
"Maybe",
"That's up to you",
"Ask again later",
#Add more here!
]
msg = random.choice(RESPONSES)
await ctx.send(msg)
In this function, we declare a list of a bunch of strings, each being a possible message that the bot can respond with. We then set msg equal to a random one using the random.choice function, and finally we send the random message back to the channel the command was called in. Launch your bot and give it a try!
Next up is a scan function.
Discord bots can do more than just send messages - they can look at pretty much any data a normal user can. With this command, we are going print all the users who currently have their status as "online" in the server. Here is the code:
@bot.command()
async def scan(ctx):
msg = "The list of all online members are:\n```"
for member in ctx.guild.members:
if(member.status == nextcord.Status.online):
msg += str(member)+"\n"
msg += "```"
await ctx.send(msg)
This command is a big one! Let's walk through it. We first create a starting point for our message back to the user. Then, using a for loop, we get all of the members that are currently in the guild. For each member, we get their current status. If it is equal to being online, we turn them into a string and then add them to our message. Afterwards, we send the message back to the channel. If you run this in the new server you have created, you should see the bot list two names; itself and you. Try making yourself go onto Do Not Disturb and run the command again. The bot should only report itself now!
Our last command is a very simple one, but helps make our bot more accessible to new users. !help will have the bot print a message that details everything it can do. Luckily for us, most of the help command is already included as part of nextcord!
If you run the help command without doing anything extra, you should see something like this:
Basic example bot
No Category:
eightball
help Shows this message
ping
scan
Type !help command for more info on a command.
You can also type !help category for more info on a category.
In order to add explanations for our commands we need to add a parameter to each of the @bot.command() decorators we added above our commands. For each command do something like this:
@bot.command(help="describe what your command does here")
This should tell nextcord to populate the help command with your custom message. If you run your bot again you should see your descriptions added to the help command!
Basic example bot
No Category:
eightball ask the 8ball a question
help Shows this message
ping pong!
scan see who is online!
Type !help command for more info on a command.
You can also type !help category for more info on a category.
We now have a bot that has 4 fun and unique commands! But we aren't done yet - let's also give our bot a cool personallity!
We want our bot to be a cool bot, so we are gonna make it react to any cool message with the sunglasses emoji.
Go back up to the on_message command and add the following if statement to the function:
if("😎" in message.content):
await message.add_reaction("😎")
Now, whenever our bot sees a message that contains 😎, it will react to that image with 😎.
Our bot is finally done, but that doesn't mean we have exhausted everything it can do! Bots are limitless with what they can do, and you can do basically anything you want with them! As this week's Unique Bingo Challenge, read through the official nextcord documentation (found here), and implement a feature that wasn't used in this lesson! This can be something like posting an image, giving itself a nickname, anything you want!