Invite Catcher

This is a Discord bot that catches all invites posted to specified channels and then posts those invites to a WordPress site.

How it works?

In the main file we started the client to connect with the discord API and we registered two events:

• on_ready: will fire whenever the bot starts its connection with Discord API.
• on_message: will be triggered whenever a new message is sent on channels that the bot has access to.

For every new incoming message that comes from a channel specified in channel_ids the bot will look for invites from discord servers through the module catdh_discord_guilds. When found, the bot will create a new post on the WordPress site to publicize the invitation, which contains a description (message content), invitation server icon and a table containing publication data.

If there is already a post for invitations from that server, the bot will simply add this new one to the end of the post. The bot will be able to find posts for a certain server by looking for its id, since when creating a post the bot intentionally adds a html comment containing the guild_id. If the found invitation has already been posted, it will be ignored.

How to run the bot

First make sure you are using python 3.8 or higher. Then install the requirements with pip. You will need to set the environment variables (create an application password on WP for this):

export DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN=""
export WORDPRESS_USER=""
export WORDPRESS_PASSWORD=""
export TWITTER_BEARER_TOKEN=""

Finally, run the main file:

python main.py

Setting it on DreamHost

To run this bot on DreamHost (the platform used by the client) I deployed the application using SSH and Git and then configured the python environment on the machine. All files referring to the bot are located at the address /home/hazzu/invit_catcher. To run it I created a bash script run_bot.sh where I set the environment variables and call main. That way I can run the bot automatically from a Cron Job:

Configuring expected channels

To control which channels will be expected by the bot to capture messages, you can use the following commands. Use them in a channel that the bot can send messages to, such as the direct message channel.