Introduction

This is the documentation for discord.py-self, a library for Python to aid in creating bots running on user accounts that utilise the Discord API.

Prerequisites

discord.py-self works with Python 3.8 or higher. Support for earlier versions of Python is not provided.

Installing

You can get the library directly from PyPI:

python3 -m pip install -U discord.py-self

If you are using Windows, then the following should be used instead:

py -3 -m pip install -U discord.py-self

To get voice support, you should use discord.py-self[voice] instead of discord.py, e.g.

python3 -m pip install -U discord.py-self[voice]

On Linux environments, installing voice requires getting the following dependencies:

For a Debian-based system, the following command will get these dependencies:

$ apt install libffi-dev libnacl-dev python3-dev

Remember to check your permissions!

Virtual Environments

Sometimes you want to keep libraries from polluting system installs or use a different version of libraries than the ones installed on the system. You might also not have permissions to install libraries system-wide. For this purpose, the standard library as of Python 3.3 comes with a concept called “Virtual Environment”s to help maintain these separate versions.

A more in-depth tutorial is found on Virtual Environments and Packages.

However, for the quick and dirty:

  1. Go to your project’s working directory:

    $ cd your-bot-source
$ python3 -m venv bot-env

  2. Activate the virtual environment:

    $ source bot-env/bin/activate

    On Windows you activate it with:

    $ bot-env\Scripts\activate.bat

  3. Use pip like usual:

    $ pip install -U discord.py-self

Congratulations. You now have a virtual environment all set up.

Basic Concepts

discord.py revolves around the concept of events. An event is something you listen to and then respond to. For example, when a message happens, you will receive an event about it that you can respond to.

A quick example to showcase how events work:

import discord

class MyClient(discord.Client):
    async def on_ready(self):
        print(f'Logged on as {self.user}!')

    async def on_message(self, message):
        print(f'Message from {message.author}: {message.content}')

client = MyClient()
client.run('token')