discord.py project 3: Random Dog Pics! 🐕

#discord #bot #discordpy #python

In this article, you're going to learn how to make a Discord bot that can:

Send a picture of a dog in an embed
Send a dog fact in an embed using footers

By the end of this post, you will know how to:

Make REST API requests
Parse JSON data
Use the footer and image fields of an embed.

Wherever the command is used, it will send an embed similar to this:

To start, we need to initialize our bot. This time, we're back using commands.Bot since we are going to have one function, our dog command.

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

client.run('token')

So far, we have a bot with the prefix !. When it's ready, it will print Ready in the console!

Let's make the dog command now! Let's start by importing the modules we will need: aiohttp and json.

Note: type pip install aiohttp before running the code!

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

client.run('token')

Now create the command:

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog')
      dogjson = await request.json()

client.run('token')

Now, dogjson will be a variable containing a dictionary, which is a list of aliases.

What's a dictionary?

An example of where you would use a dictionary is in a substitution cipher. You might be making an a1z26 (where a becomes 1, b becomes 2, etc.). So, you'd make a dictionary to make it easier:

azdict = {'a':'1', 'b':'2', 'c':'3'}

Now, you could use this to substitute:

my_string = "abc abc"
for index, letter in enumerate(my_string): # Iterate through each letter
   if letter in azdict.keys(): # iterate through the key and not the value (e.g. a, b, c, and so on)
      my_string[index] = azdict[letter]
print(my_string)

>> '123 123'

Knowing that the dictionary is structured like this:

we know that we want to use the link key.

Now, we can

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog') # Make a request
      dogjson = await request.json() # Convert it to a JSON dictionary
   embed = discord.Embed(title="Doggo!", color=discord.Color.purple()) # Create embed
   embed.set_image(url=dogjson['link']) # Set the embed image to the value of the 'link' key
   await ctx.send(embed=embed) # Send the embed

client.run('token')

Now, when we use the bot command, we will get this output:

Now, let's have it send a dog fact as well! SomeRandomAPI also has a dog facts endpoint, which will allow us to get a random fact about dogs!

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog')
      dogjson = await request.json()
      # This time we'll get the fact request as well!
      request2 = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/facts/dog')
      factjson = await request2.json()

   embed = discord.Embed(title="Doggo!", color=discord.Color.purple())
   embed.set_image(url=dogjson['link'])
   embed.set_footer(text=factjson['fact'])
   await ctx.send(embed=embed)

This will produce the following!

Have Questions? Have a suggestion about what to do for the next post?

Tell me in the comments and I'll reply!

Top comments (5)

Wasian1 • Dec 19 '21

Hi, I'm trying to apply your methodology but with a different API. The key for mine is different (url) and I'm wondering if this might be affecting why my bot won't send the image when I input the command. I've attached my current code below. Please let me know if you can assist and thank you for the post! Code done in Replit

import discord
import os
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = discord.Client()

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="$")

@client.command()
async def waifu(ctx):
async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
request = await session.get('api.waifu.pics/sfw/waifu') # Make a request
waifujson = await request.json() # Convert it to a JSON dictionary
embed = discord.Embed(title="Yabei", color=discord.Color.random()) # Create embed
embed.set_image(url=waifujson['url']) # Set the embed image to the value of the 'link' key
await ctx.send(embed=embed) # Send the embed

@client.event
async def on_ready():
print('We have logged in as {0.user}'.format(client))

client.run(os.getenv('TOKEN'))