My experience in building a Discord bot!!

#discord #todayilearned #weeklyretro #bot

I have been working on Zoro, a discord bot, for the last few days. To be honest, this all started when I wanted to build an open source project. I didn't had any idea on what to build at first. I have been using discord for the past few years and I always wanted a bot of my own. So why not build a discord bot? That's how I decided to build a bot.

But...how to build a bot?

Yeah, that's the exact question I had at first, How? Just like any other developer I too started googling on "How to make a discord bot" (Funny but without google or stack overflow most of us wouldn't be here 😝). Thanks to the whole developer community, there were many articles and tutorials on this.(phew, thank god I found those somehow 😌)

Then what?

I then started going through all those articles and tutorials to get an idea on how to start. Created an application and bot on discord developer portal and GitHub repo for this project(yea, it's open source, feel free to check it out and contribute✨).
And then it was time to put on coding cap and start coding....

How was it?

It was fun! I mean, really fun!! I always loved building stuffs. We use discordjs for building the bot. It's a nodejs module. If you are familiar with nodejs or vanilla js then this won't be really difficult for you. All that matters is your imagination. You can make the bot do whatever you want. When I first went through the docs on discordjs I was overwhelmed, there was a lot to grasp.

Wait, wait...don't jump into conclusion that it's hard and not for you. It's fairly simple, it's well documented and most of the tutorials and articles will give clear picture on the whole thing.

Can I build a bot too?

Of course you can. You can build a fully functional bot on your own. Don't underestimate your skills. I will list down some of the resources that I used.

DiscordJS: Don't ignore the docs. Doc's are really a life savers.
TheCodingTrain
Worn Off Keys
freeCodeCamp
npm packages There are a lot of packages already build by lot of awesome developers to ease out your burden

Oh yea I forgot to mention something, Discord bot can be build both using JavaScript and Python. What I used is JS but if you are comfortable with python just go with that.

Conclusion

Building a discord bot is not that hard. If I can do it, then you can too. Just don't overestimate the time needed to build it. You really can't build a multi purpose bot over night(may be the ones who already build one can do that, or some super geniuses 😅). It takes some time, but no worries, it's fun.

If you are interested in the bot I made feel free to check it out, contributions are welcome ❤️