discord-python-starter

A starter template for making discord bots with Honcho that are deployed to fly.io

The main logic for the discord bot is in the bot.py file. It contains 2 functions.

• on_message — the event that is run when a message is sent to the server the bot is in
• restart — A discord slash command called restart. It is used to close the session and create a new one

The template uses openrouter for LLM inferences and supports all the LLMs on there

Getting Started

First, install the dependencies for the project.

uv sync

From here you can edit the bot.py file to add whatever logic you want for the 3 methods described above. Additional functionality can be added to the bot. Refer to the py-cord documentation

Environment Variables

The repo contains a .env.template file that shows all the default environment variables used by the discord bot. Make a copy of this template and fill out the .env with your own values.

cp .env.template .env

Caution

Make sure you do not push your .env file to GitHub or any other version control. These should remain secret. By default the included .gitignore file should prevent this.

Run locally

source .venv/bin/activate
python src/bot.py

Docker

The project offers Docker for packaging the bot code and providing a single executable to start the bot. The below commands will build the docker image and then run the bot using a local .env file.

docker build -t discord-bot . && docker run --env-file .env discord-bot

Deployment

The project contains a generic fly.toml that will run a single process for the discord bot.

To launch the bot for the first time, run fly launch. Use cat .env | fly secrets import to add the environment variables to fly.

By default, fly.toml will automatically stop the machine if inactive. This doesn't work well with a discord bot, so remove that line and change min_machines_running to 1.

After launching, use fly deploy to update your deployment.