VAIT Discord Bot Project

Table of contents

• VAIT Discord Bot Project
  • Table of contents
  • Forewords
  • Requirements
  • Contributions
  • Onboarding
    • Creating your discord app and bot
    • Creating the config files
      • Using the onboarding script
      • Manually
    • Build and run the service locally
  • Useful commands
    • Running tests
    • Testing production build

Forewords

This documentation below is for contributing to the bot. For bot commands and usage, please visit our Wiki page.

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Requirements

• To run the bot process, you'll need:

  • Node 20+
  • PNPM 8+

• To run the database, you'll need either:

  • Docker 20+, Docker Compose 1.28+ - To run locally
  • OR A Postgres DBaaS Account. Our preferred provider is Neon. They have a free tier that is more than enough for development.

Note: From this point onwards, this document assumes you're running the database locally with Docker. If you prefer using a DBaaS instead, please fill in the .env file with the values you get from your DBaaS provider, and just skip the steps of setting up a local DB container (e.g. any steps that requires docker compose up db)

Contributions

For Contributions, please have a look these document

• GIT_DEV_GUIDELINE.md [MUST READ]
• CONTRIBUTORS.md [MUST READ]

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Onboarding

Creating your discord app and bot

• You will need to manually create a new discord application and a new bot. Please check out Create a Bot Application and Adding a bot to your servers for more details, with 2 notes:

  1. To ensure that the bot can read the messages content, check the Discord Developer Portal => Bot Section and ensure that Privileged Gateway Intents => Message Content Intent feature is enabled
  2. When adding the bot to your server using OAuth2 URL generator, under BOT PERMISSIONS => GENERAL PERMISSIONS, ensure that "Administrator" is enabled.

• While creating the bot, please note down the bot TOKEN

• On the application page, go to the General Information and note down the PUBLIC KEY

• Click Oauth2 from the left panel, and note down your CLIENT ID

• Once you have invited the bot to your server, open Discord, go to Settings > Advanced and enable developer mode. Then, right-click on the server title and select "Copy ID" to get the GUILD ID.

• Please make sure you have these information before proceeding to the next step.

Creating the config files

Using the onboarding script

On most UNIX-like systems (macOS, Linux and WSL), you should be able to run the onboarding script. This script will create a local dev environment file, install dependencies, and setup a pre-commit git hook and a local database setup via Docker.

./scripts/onboarding.sh

Please ensure that you have all the required programs/executable are installed on your machine before running the script. If somehow the script does not work for you, please let us know via the Issue tab or ping us on Discord, and you might need to follow through the manual process.

Manually

After creating your discord app and bot, create config file and fill in the values you get from the previous step

cp .env.dist .env

• The .env file needs to be filled in with these values:
  • Discord configs:
    • TOKEN: Your bot token created in previous step
    • GUILD_ID: The guild ID that you want to use your bot with to test out commands
    • PUBLIC_KEY: Your bot public key.
    • CLIENT_ID: The client ID of your bot
  • Axiom configs: Ignore this section because this will be production only.
  • DB Values: We already fill in some defaults for this to work in a local environment.
    • POSTGRES_HOST: localhost
    • POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, POSTGRES_DB: You can fill in whatever you like with these or just leave it with default value, since it only affects your local dev environment. But please keep it consistent since if you lose it, you will lose access to your local database and will need to re-create it.

Note: DO NOT commit the .env file to Git.

Build and run the service locally

Run these commands at the root of the project

docker compose up -d db

pnpm install
pnpm run prisma:gen
pnpm run deploy:command
pnpm run start

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Useful commands

DB migration & Client Generation

pnpm run prisma:migrate
pnpm run prisma:gen

DB GUI

pnpm run prisma:studio

Deploying your commands to a test Discord Server

• Please make sure you have filled out your GUILD_ID, TOKEN and CLIENT_ID in the .env file.
• Add your commands into the src/slash-commands/index.ts & src/context-menu-commands/index.ts file like so.

// File: src/slash-commands/index.ts
import yourCommand from './your-command';

export const commandList: SlashCommand[] = [yourCommand];

// File: src/context-menu-commands/index.ts
import yourCommand from './your-command';

export const commandList: ContextMenuCommand[] = [yourCommand]

• Run the deploy:command command.

pnpm run deploy:command

• IMPORTANT: You should only deploy your commands ONCE ONLY after there is a change in command registration (adding a new command, editing options of an existing one). Running this too many times in a short period of time will cause Discord API to lock your bot out.

Troubleshooting

• When deploy slash commands, if you got Error: Cannot deploy commands, it's normally because of your bot doesn't have permission to do so. You need to authorize your bot with scope: bot and applications.commands using https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=$CLIENT_ID&permissions=0&scope=bot%20applications.commands

• Another reason might be because the bot authorisation failed. Please open the previously generated .env file and make sure your credentials are correct.

• If a bot cannot read the messages content, check the Discord Developer Portal => Bot Section and see under Privileged Gateway Intents => Message Content Intent feature is enabled. This should be enabled.

Running lints and tests

pnpm run lint
pnpm run format
pnpm run test

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Testing production build

• Copy out an env file for the stage you're testing. Use .env.production for production.
• Build the staging/production stage image.
• Start the service to test.
• For the .env.production file, instead of localhost, put in db as the POSTGRES_HOST.

cp .env.dist .env.production
docker compose -f docker-compose.production.yml build bot
docker compose -f docker-compose.production.yml up db bot