Creating your own Bot

.env configuration

Development Environment

Setting up your node module

First we need to create a new directory and initialize our node package:

Workspace Directory

$ mkdir testbot
$ cd testbot
$ npm init
$ npm install @autobot/common discord.js

Getting ready to create your own command modules requires a short bit of setup. We need to initialize our node package, install a few packages and create a src/ directory as follows.

Directory Structure

Matthews-MacBook-Pro-178 in ~/workspace/work/testbot
± |master U:1 ✗| → ls -la

-rw-r--r--    1 yomateod  staff       314 Jun  4 22:05 .env
drwxr-xr-x  289 yomateod  staff      9248 Jun  8 18:12 node_modules
-rw-r--r--    1 yomateod  staff     99150 Jun  8 18:12 package-lock.json
-rw-r--r--    1 yomateod  staff       681 Jun  8 18:12 package.json
drwxr-xr-x    5 yomateod  staff       160 Jun  2 13:40 src

Configuration

The autobots framework relies on environment variables for configuration. We use the dotenv module to load the .env configuration file in the project root at boot time.

The required variables are:

Variable Name	Description
TOKEN	Discord bot token.
NAMESPACE	The directory which you will publish your node modules under.
MODULE_PATTERN	The pattern to look for node modules directory names.

Here is an example of a .env file with some custom variables for our testbot that we'll read in later:

/.env

# *** DO NOT CHECK THE .env FILE INTO GIT! ***

#
# Your discord token. (required)
#
TOKEN=<your discord bot token>

#
# The directory in node_modules to look for modules. (required)
#
NAMESPACE=@autobot

#
# The pattern to use for including modules. (required)
#
MODULE_PATTERN=module-*

#
# Port for the web server to run on. (optional)
#
PORT=8080

#####################################################################
#
# Individual module configurations.
#
#####################################################################

#
# Your own testbot environment variables.
#
TESTBOT_BOTNAME=tester mctest
TESTBOT_TEST_PREFIX=>test

Create this file in your project root directory and name it .env.

bot.js

Create a file named bot.js. This will be our bootstrap file which will initialize our bot:

testbot/bot.js

const autobot = require('@autobot/common');

autobot.BOT.start(__dirname + '/..');