dumas

A Discord bot written in Python to bring back memories and create funny conversations for you and your friends.

What is it?

This program will let a Discord bot read your old messages and randomly send them to a specified channel. If you and your friends talk a lot, some of your messages taken out of context will entertain you, we promise!

Installation

Dependencies

Since the bot is written in Python, you only need to install a Python environment some dependencies with pip, using the following command:

$ pip install discord.py

Configuration

The program needs a configuration file, which contains important data about your server and bot. The configuration file should look like this:

{
  "bot": {
    "app": 123456789987654321,
    "token": "AbcDeFGhIjKLMnoPqRStUvWXYz123-4.5_6789abCdEFGhiYKlMnJoP-rsT"
  },
  "channel": {
    "sources": [
      123456789987654321
    ],
    "target": 123456789987654321
  },
  "message": {
    "farewell": "Goodbye friends!",
    "frequency": 5,
    "length": 10,
    "limit": 1000,
    "warning": "Oh, I see what you did there!",
    "welcome": "It's a me, Discord bot!"
  }
}

Field	Type	Description
bot.app	integer	ID of the application which owns the bot
bot.token	string	secret token of the bot
channel.sources	array[integer]	IDs of the channels of which the bot will pick messages
channel.target	integer	ID of the channels to which the bot will send messages
message.farewell	string	the message the bot will send before disconnecting
message.frequency	integer	the frequency of the continous messages (in seconds)
message.length	integer	the minimum length of the messages to choose from
message.limit	integer	the maximum number of messages to parse
message.warning	string	the message the bot will send when an expected problem occurres
message.welcome	string	the message the bot will send after connecting

How to run

After you installed the dependencies and created a configuration file, you can simply run the program with the following command:

$ python main.py [options] <absolute-path-to-configuration-file>

Commands

As every good bot, dumas also has commands. Just type one of these into a channel, which has been specified as source.

Command	Description
&help	dumas will show how to use it
&start [author_id]	dumas will send a message from time to time (based on the value of message.frequency)
&stop	dumas will stop sending messages
&random [author_id]	dumas will send a random message immediately
&show-config	dumas will show the active configuration

Deploying to Heroku

Maybe, you will want to deploy your bot to Heroku. You can find many great guides on the internet, to deploy an application, but I want to share some important information about this application.

After you deployed dumas, the program will search for the specified configuration file every minute, until finds it. However, the Heroku deploy process won't create a config file for you - you will have to create it manually. To achive your goal, you will need heroku-cli.

With the help of the following commands, you will be able to create a configuration file in minutes:

$ heroku run bash --app <app-name>
$ touch config
$ echo "{\"bot\":{...}}" > /app/config.json
$ exit

If you will run the program in Heroku, it will search for the configuration file at /app/config.json, so be careful where you put your file.

Useful commands

To completely stop the application use the following commands:

$ heroku maintenance:on --app <app-name>
$ heroku ps:scale web=0 --app <app-name>

To turn on later use the following commands:

$ heroku maintenance:off --app <app-name>
$ heroku ps:scale web=1  --app <app-name>

To check if dynos ar running use the following commands:

$ heroku ps --app <app-name>