Quickstart

This page gives a brief introduction to the library. It assumes you have the library installed, if you don’t check the Installing portion.

A Minimal Bot

Let’s make a bot that responds to a specific message and walk you through it.

It looks something like this:

import discord

client = discord.Client()

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'We have logged in as {client.user}')

@client.event
async def on_message(message):
    if message.author == client.user:
        return

    if message.content.startswith('$hello'):
        await message.channel.send('Hello!')

client.run('your token here')

Let’s name this file example_bot.py. Make sure not to name it discord.py as that’ll conflict with the library.

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s walk you through it step by step.

1. The first line just imports the library, if this raises a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportError then head on over to Installing section to properly install.

2. Next, we create an instance of a Client. This client is our connection to Discord.

3. We then use the Client.event() decorator to register an event. This library has many events. Since this library is asynchronous, we do things in a “callback” style manner.

   A callback is essentially a function that is called when something happens. In our case, the on_ready() event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up and the on_message() event is called when the bot has received a message.

4. Since the on_message() event triggers for every message received, we have to make sure that we ignore messages from ourselves. We do this by checking if the Message.author is the same as the Client.user.

5. Afterwards, we check if the Message.content starts with '$hello'. If it does, then we send a message in the channel it was used in with 'Hello!'. This is a basic way of handling commands, which can be later automated with the discord.ext.commands – Bot commands framework framework.

6. Finally, we run the bot with our login token. If you need help getting your token or creating a bot, look in the Creating a Bot Account section.

Now that we’ve made a bot, we have to run the bot. Luckily, this is simple since this is just a Python script, we can run it directly.

On Windows:

$ py -3 example_bot.py

On other systems:

$ python3 example_bot.py

Now you can try playing around with your basic bot.