part-1.md

Welcome to Discord.py Guide!

This guide will cover all the basic things you need to learn to get started with making discord bots using the discord.py library

Part I:- Configuring the basic settings for starting a discord bot

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

These modules can be installed directly by running the following command in Command Prompt / Terminal( Depending on what OS you're currently using ).

pip install discord.py

If the installation was successful, It should look something like this:

Once this is done, we can start with writing some code to create our first ever discord bot written in python!

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

# Enabling all the intents for our discord bot

intents = discord.Intents.all()

# Creating an instance of the Bot class and setting up the command prefix

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = "!", intents = intents)

Intents are a way to specify what events the bot should receive from Discord. intents = discord.Intents.all() indicates that the bot should receive all intents, allowing it to access all types of events.

command_prefix = "!" specifies the prefix that the bot will use to recognize commands. Feel free to change it to whatever you feel like!

• Note: The command_prefix parameter also accepts an array of prefixes seperated by commas. This way, you can have multiple prefixes for your discord bot.

For example,

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = ["?", "!", ".", ",", "~",... so on], intents = intents)

Also, you can use the word client instead of bot. For this guide, I will be using the word bot since it's much shorter.

Now, let's write a code that runs when our bot goes online!

To do this, we will use a decorator along with a discord.py's pre-defined asynchronous function called on_ready

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

# Enabling all the intents for our discord bot

intents = discord.Intents.all()

# Creating an instance of the Bot class and setting up the command prefix

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = "!", intents = intents)

# Configuring an event that the bot will listen to when it comes online

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

Now what the hell are decorators?

Decorators are a powerful feature that allows you to modify or extend the behaviour of functions or methods without changing their actual code. Decorators are implemented using the @decorator_name syntax followed by the function or method you want to decorate( or modify in layman's terms ).

In the above code snippet, the decorator is the @bot.event and the function which is being decorated or modified is the on_ready function.

If you wish to learn more about decorators in python, you can click on this link -> Python Decorators.

And what about async and await?

async and await are features in Python for writing asynchronous code, typically used in conjunction with the asyncio library. Asynchronous programming allows us to write code that can perform multiple tasks concurrently, without blocking the execution of other code.

We want our bot to respond to multiple users using the command at the same time, and we don't want to delay a command execution just because someone else used a different command before!

Here's a basic example:

import asyncio

async def greet():
    print("Hello")
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    print("World")

async def main():
    await greet()

asyncio.run(main())

In the above example, asyncio.sleep(1) is an asynchronous operation that pauses the execution for 1 second without blocking the other tasks. The await keyword is used to wait for this operation to complete before continuing with the execution.

To know more about asynchronous operations, you can click on this link -> Async / Await

Now let's get back to the code we were writing for starting our discord bot

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

# Enabling all the intents for our discord bot

intents = discord.Intents.all()

# Creating an instance of the Bot class and setting up the command prefix

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = "!", intents = intents)

# Configuring an event that the bot will listen to when it comes online

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

# Running the bot using the bot.run() method

bot.run("INSERT YOUR BOT TOKEN HERE")

Now it's just that you have to insert a line at the end of your code, which is bot.run(). This takes in bot token in string( str ) format.

CAUTION⚠️

A bot token is a long string of characters that looks similar to the image attached below this message.

It's crucial to keep your bot token secret and never share it publicly, as anyone with access to the token can control your bot. If your token is compromised, you should regenerate it immediately through the Discord Developer Portal by clicking on the Reset Token button!

I am able to confidently share my discord bot's token because I will be able to reset it before I publish this info on GitHub!

Now let's get back to making our discord bot

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

# Enabling all the intents for our discord bot

intents = discord.Intents.all()

# Creating an instance of the Bot class and setting up the command prefix

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = "!", intents = intents)

# Configuring an event that the bot will listen to when it comes online

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

# Running the bot using the bot.run() method

bot.run("INSERT YOUR BOT TOKEN HERE")

Don't worry, I have not changed anything.

We just have to run this code and the terminal should display a message saying that our bot is now online!

This is how it should look like if everything is setup correctly

As we can see in the above image, the bot logged in successfully and is now online!

But the bot doesn't do anything as of now, because we haven't created any commands for our bot.

So let's make a really basic command for our discord bot which when used, will greet the user who ran the command!

This will be the last topic for our part 1 of this discord.py bot tutorial!

# importing the necessary modules

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

# Enabling all the intents for our discord bot

intents = discord.Intents.all()

# Creating an instance of the Bot class and setting up the command prefix

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix = "!", intents = intents)

# Configuring an event that the bot will listen to when it comes online

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

# Configuring a command that the bot will respond to when a user uses that particular command

@bot.command(aliases = ["HELLO", "Hello",... so on])
async def hello(ctx):
    await ctx.send(f"Hello {ctx.author.mention}!")

# Running the bot using the bot.run() method

bot.run("INSERT YOUR BOT TOKEN HERE")

For making commands, we use the @bot.command() decorator which takes aliases as input. aliases can be a single string of word or multiple words in an array seperated by commas as shown in the above code snippet.

Then we define the async function which is named as hello in this example. It is to be noted that the function name should always be same as the command name so it is advised to name it properly. This async function takes ctx as input.

Now what's ctx?

ctx stands for context( An instance of the Context class in discord.py ) and it represents the context in which a command is being invoked. It contains information about the message, the channel, the author, and other relevant data, allowing us to interact with the Discord API and respond appropriately to the command.

It is to be noted that ctx name is purely just a naming convention which is often used by developers a lot. It is up to you and the developer to decide what the name should actually be. For example, you can also name ctx as context if you like that more! However, throughout this entire guide, I will be using the same naming convention as other developers use.. which is ctx.

ctx has a whole bunch of attributes. I have mentioned the most important and frequently used ones below!

• ctx.author.id: This returns an integer representing the User ID of the user who used that particular command.

• ctx.author.mention: This will return a string that mentions the user who triggered the command.

• ctx.author.name: This returns a string which represents the user's global name( which is called username because discord doesn't support discriminators( #0000 ) anymore ) who triggered the particular command.

• ctx.author.avatar.url: This returns an url which represents the user's avatar( or pfp ) who triggered the command.

• ctx.send: As simple as it sounds, this is used to send a message in the channel the user triggered the command.

• ctx.reply: Used for replying to the user's message when that user triggers that command.

For more info, you can visit the official documentation of discord.py for learning more about Context.

And there we go! You can now create some basic commands for a discord bot that can respond to user's messages!

If you'd like a copy of the entire script and commands, you can open the main.py file of this github repository and can take a look at it or can also use it yourself for your discord bot.

This is nyx... signing off👋🏻