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quickstart.rst

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.. currentmodule:: discord

Quickstart

This page gives a brief introduction to the library. It assumes you have the library installed, if you don't check the :ref:`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 :ref:`installing` section to properly install.

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

  3. We then use the :meth:`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 :func:`on_ready` event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up and the :func:`on_message` event is called when the bot has received a message.

  4. Since the :func:`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 :attr:`Message.author` is the same as the :attr:`Client.user`.

  5. Afterwards, we check if the :class:`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 :doc:`./ext/commands/index` 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 :ref:`discord-intro` 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.