Billy Gigurtsis

Making a simple Discord bot with Python

Aug 15, 2022
2 minute read

I had the idea to make a simple discord bot that would react to a user’s messages. The bot uses discord.py, a Discord API wrapper built in python. It is designed to react if, and only if, a specific user sends either a link or uploads an image.

A ‘reaction’ on discord looks like this, nothing too intrusive:

Here’s the full code for my bot:

# bot.py
import os
import re
import discord

from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

client = discord.Client()

@client.event
# function to check for regex matching a url
async def on_message(message):

    emoji = '<:timeout2:806320653451001856>'

    regex = re.compile('((http|https)\:\/\/)?[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/\?\:@\-_=#]+\.([a-zA-Z]){2,6}([a-zA-Z0-9\.\&\/\?\:@\-_=#])*')
    match = regex.search(message.content)#

    if message.author.bot:
        return
    elif message.author.id == 389104618099048468:
        if match or message.attachments:
            await message.add_reaction(emoji)

client.run(os.getenv('TOKEN'))

I’ll take you through the code bit by bit, explaining what each part does.

load_dotenv()

This calls load_dotenv, loading environment variables from a file called .env in the current directory. My .env file holds the OAuth2 token that allows the bot to connect with my Discord developer account.

It’s important to put .env inside .gitignore if publishing the code to GitHub as anyone with this token could place their bot in my Discord server with admin privileges. I did this accidentally. Luckily for me, Discord has a bot that crawls GitHub, cancels your token and alerts you if you upload your token there by accident. Thanks, Discord!

client = discord.Client()

@client.event

Create an instance of client, our connection to Discord. The second line tells python that an event needs to happen to execute.

async def on_message(message):

Runs the following code when a message is received.

emoji = '<:timeout2:806320653451001856>'

I want the bot to react to messages with a specific emoji. Here I define which emoji and ID of that emoji.

regex = re.compile('((http|https)\:\/\/)?[a-zA-Z0-9\.\/\?\:@\-_=#]+\.([a-zA-Z]){2,6}([a-zA-Z0-9\.\&\/\?\:@\-_=#])*')
match = regex.search(message.content)#

These two lines of code are how the bot detects links in a specific message. I define some regex will only match to a link and pass this as a function match.

if message.author.bot:
    return
elif message.author.id == 389104618099048468:
    if match or message.attachments:
        await message.add_reaction(emoji)

This block first checks if the message received is from any bot. If so it returns and waits for another message.

Otherwise, it checks for a specific user ID that I define. Then if it that message either match’s the regex (is a link) or if the message contains an attachment the bot reacts to that message.

client.run(os.getenv('TOKEN'))

Finally, this code takes the OAuth2 token and passes it to the bot.

Further information and documentation for discord.py can be found here.

Categories: engineering