Creating a discord bot for my CSE server

Motivation#

I wanted to create a Discord server just for Computer Systems Engineers to increase collaboration with the small number of people that take the course. To extend this into a proper learning opportunity I then decided I wanted to create my own discord bot using discord.js.

The main thing I wanted to implement was a role selector such that users could select their current year of study. This role would then be used to determine which channels the user can see and interact with.

Prerequisites#

Creating the discord channel itself requires little technical expertise. For the bot, it requires basic knowledge of the language JavaScript. At the start of each subsection I will provide some brief, bulleted steps. I would encourage you to still watch the video as this will ensure you do not miss anything.

Anything that needs downloading will be linked in the bulleted steps where appropriate.

Development#

Initial setup#

Creating a generic menu selector#

  • Create a components folder
  • Create a handle components file
  • Ignore the button specific code
  • Now you should have the general framework to implement the menu
  • Follow the tutorial below and create a generic menu selector

Creating a role selector#

  • Now you should have the foundation in place for a select menu
  • Navigate to src/commands/tools/<name of the menu file>
  • Adjust the roles to your liking
  • Navigate to src/events/client/interactionCreate.js
  • Navigate within the isSelectMenu() else if statement
  • Define the roles you want using their IDs
  • Create an if statement to specify the role selector menu
  • Change the role of the member depending on the option they pick

To define the roles you can use: const [ROLE_NAME] = interaction.guild.roles.cache.find(role => role.id === '[ID]');

To specify your role selector menu you can use: if (interaction.customId === '[CUSTOM_ID_OF_MENU]') {...}

Finally you can take the users choice and determine their roles as such: Within the previous if statement we just created if (interaction.values[0] === '[VALUE_OF_MENU_OPTION]') Now you can add and remove roles with await member.roles.add/remove([ROLE_NAME])

24/7 Bot uptime#

  • Create a Heroku account
  • Install the Heroku CLI
  • Install https://git-scm.com/
  • Create the .gitignore file (copy in token even if using .env)
  • Create the Procfile
  • Create a repository and deploy it
  • Activate the worker command on Heroku
  • Check the logs and your discord to see if your bot is online and working!

The final result#

  • Feel free to add me on Discord by the way!

Reflection#

This was a fun mini-project to complete first of all. I found it quite engaging for a few reasons:

  • I made myself accountable by telling people I was making a Discord server
  • I use Discord a lot
  • Due to the recent changes to discord.js I could not just completely rely on video tutorials

Using JavaScript for the first time alonside discord.js was overwhelming and if I wanted a smoother devleopment experience I should have first learnt some of the JavaScript syntax. This would have made it easier for me to understand the code, though I did manage to work my way through by reading the documentation and various help logs on the discord.js Discord channel.

I might add more features to this bot, although currently I have no specific plans as I only wanted a role selector when I first envisioned this project.

Creating a discord bot for my CSE server