An introduction to building a Discord bot using the Discord.js module. The bot will share random jokes, assign or revoke user roles, and post tweets of a specific account to a Discord channel.

Team communication platforms are getting popular day by day, as more and more people work from home. Slack and Discord are two of the most popular team communication platforms. While Discord is focused on gamers, some functionality, such as the ability to add up to 50 members in the voice call room, make it an excellent alternative to Slack. One of the most significant advantages of using such a platform is that many tasks can be automated using bots.

In this article, we’ll build a bot from scratch using JavaScript and with help from Discord.js. We’ll cover the process from building the bot up to deploying it to the cloud. Before building our bot, let’s jot down the functionality that our bot will have:

• Share random jokes from an array of jokes.
• Add and remove user roles by selecting emoji.
• Share tweets from a particular account to a particular channel.

Because the Discord.js module is based on Node.js, I’ll assume that you are somewhat familiar with Node.js and npm. Familiarity with JavaScript is a must for this article.

Now that we know the prerequisites and our goal, let’s start. And if you want to clone and explore the code right away, you can with the GitHub repository.

Steps To Follow

We will be building the bot by following a few steps.

First, we’ll build a Discord server. A Discord server is like a group in which you can assign various topics to various channels, very similar to a Slack server. A major difference between Slack and Discord is that Slack requires different login credentials to access different servers, whereas in Discord you can access all of the servers that you are part of with a single authentication.

The reason we need to create a server is that, without admin privileges for a server, we won’t be able to add a bot to the server. Once our server is created, we will add the bot to the server and get the access token from Discord’s developer portal. This token allows us to communicate with the Discord API. Discord provides an official open API for us to interact with. The API can be used for anything from serving requests for bots to integrating OAuth. The API supports everything from a single-server bot all the way up to a bot that can be integrated on hundreds of servers. It is very powerful and can be implemented in a lot of ways.

The Discord.js library will help us to communicate with the Discord API using the access token. All of the functions will be based on the Discord API. Then, we can start coding our bot. We will start by writing small bits of code that will introduce us to the Discord API and the Discord.js library. We will then understand the concept of partials in Discord.js. Once we understand partials, we’ll add what’s known as a “reaction role” system to the bot. With that done, we will also know how to communicate with Twitter using an npm package called twit. This npm package will help us to integrate the Twitter tweet-forwarding functionality. Finally, we will deploy it to the cloud using Heroku.

Now that we know how we are going to build our bot, let’s start working on it.

#chatbot #artificial-intelligence #developer #discord