Puban bot

A bot built to teach people about a made-up cipher I've made with a friend. The cipher is called Puban.

The language core translation scripts and unit tests have been moved to another repo, puban-languages

Cloning this repo

This repo uses the Puban language core repo as a Git submodule, so the usual clone won't clone the submodule. For proper cloning, run

git clone --recurse-submodules [repo_url]

Installing dependencies

This is a Node project, so to run it you'll need NodeJS and NPM installed. It's been tested in the version v18.16.0 of Node.

To install dependencies, run in the app folder:

npm i

Running the bot

Setting up the environment

After creating the bot in the Discord applications tab, you'll get a token and a client ID, which you can use to set up your environment (through a file called .env.development or .env.production). Your environment file should look like .env.example. You can omit GUILD_ID for the deploy command to publish commands to all servers the bot is in, or specify it to scope it to a specific server.

Remember to keep the environment file secret as leaking this information can lead to malicious behavior happening freely on the bot. If for some reason your bot token gets leaked, access the developer application tab and reset it; that will invalidate the previous token and prevent further malicious behavior!

Inviting the bot to a guild

To invite your bot to a guild, you can use the URL generator tab, under the OAuth2 section in your Discord application view. Currently it only needs the scopes bot and applications.commands. That page will generate the URL for making the bot join a guild.

Registering commands

After your bot has joined a guild, for the slash commands to appear on the interface, it's necessary to tell Discord what commands are there (i.e. effectively deploy them). You can deploy commands globally (for all guilds your bot is on) or locally (for specific guilds).

Remember that setting a GUILD_ID in your environment file will scope the update to a specific guild (server). You can find a guild ID it by enabling dev mode on Discord and then right-clicking your guild and then "Copy server ID".

To deploy using data from .env.development, run

npm run deploy:dev

To deploy using data from .env.produciton, run

npm run deploy:prod

Running the bot

To run the bot in development mode, run

npm run start:dev

To run it in production mode, run

npm run start:prod

Currently the environment variable does not add behavior, but it is implemented this way in case at some point it does. This means you can run the base script directly, npm run start and it will start up the bot, but it's not recommended.