Discord Bot Project

Backup for my discontinued Discord bot project, which was initially developed as a loose clone of the former Groovy bot.

There's little commit history because the contents of the repository were copied over to a new one before pushing to GitHub. This is because I accidentally exposed sensitive credentials like the bot token, AWS secrets, etc. when I returned to clean up the code and make it more presentable. That mistake aside, I performed some refactors, including:

Migrating to discord.py v2.
Organizing the source files into a Python package (also managed by pyproject.toml instead of the legacy requirements.txt approach).
Use better practices, such as improved logging and opting for the more conventional .env file instead of the previous metadata.json file.

Features

Music Player

Streaming audio from YouTube with the yt_dlp library.
Managing the audio queue with commands and embed responses heavily inspired by Groovy. In fact, this project started in part as a way to have multiple music bots in my friend's server at once, so I attempted to reverse-engineer Groovy's behavior.
Saving, loading, and viewing playlist as saved queues, although implementation was quite primitive and functionality quite limited as it was the first time I used 3rd party object storage, namely AWS S3.

Convenience Commands

Various tools that assisted me personally in my school life, such as Python eval and REPL commands (which I know now are a security hazard without proper sanitization), pulling up data from PubChem, currency conversions, etc.
Some commands related to the Mudae bot, which some of my friends and I were obsessed with at the time.
Easter egg features like making the bot annoy a user by replying to everything they say, reciting the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, etc.

History

An instance of my bot had been running on Heroku since March 2021, and my friends and I used it on our private Discord server since then until November 28, 2022, the day Heroku shut down its free tier. Now, the bot only runs when I run it manually on my local machine.

This bot had been my passion project for some time, and any feature that made me think "but what if I could do xyz without having to leave the Discord app?" was the next new idea. Unfortunately, I eventually lost interest (in coding altogether, for some time) and did not want to continue maintaining a codebase that was the most complex I've ever dealt with in my hobbyist career.

I was also hesistant to return even after I rekindled my love for coding because by then I had learned much more and realized how many poor practices my code exhibited, and it seemed too daunting to refactor. I eventually came back to bring some aspects of the codebase up to my new standards, but the core implementation remains as legacy code that I'll leave be for now.

I think writing code that works but is so utterly garbage is an indispensable experience every coder goes through, so I've decided after a long time to put this repository in public display as one monument of many to come in my coding journey and as a reminder to myself to keep pushing for cleaner code.

Setup

As usual, you can recreate the Python environment with:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

The program is run by invoking the package as a module from within the src directory:

cd src && python -m bot
# Or use the Makefile rule:
make

To use voice capabilities, you must have FFmpeg installed and on your PATH.

Heroku Deployment (Legacy)

The link to my Heroku app (only accessibly to me, obviously) is:

https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/tacobot-py-alt

As a reminder to myself, this application belongs to the account using my UCLA school email.

The process also involved setting up the required buildpacks, notably the one for FFmpeg.

Environment Recovery

If for whatever reason I lose my local copy, two .gitignore'd files need to be replaced:

.env

The required key names are:

TACOBOT_TOKEN: the Discord bot token, which can be regenerated on the developer portal.
TESTER_TOKEN: alternate Discord bot token, similar to above.
AWS_ACCESS_KEY: access key for this application, which can be found/regenerated on the IAM console.
AWS_SECRET_KEY: secret key for this application, similar to above.
CURRENCYSCOOP_KEY: API key for CurrencyScoop (renamed CurrencyBeacon), which can be found at account settings.
DEV_USER_ID: my Discord user ID, which can be found by enabling Developer Mode and right clicking my user profile and selecting Copy ID.

API tokens or secrets can be found or regenerated on their respective developer portals.

src/bot/names.py

The constants are:

# Mapping of ID to real names for some of my friends
REAL_NAMES: dict[int, str]

MUDAE_ID: int  # ID of the Mudae bot
BORG_ID: int  # My alt account ID
VIN_ID: int  # My ID
LH_ID: int  # My friend's server, LoudHouse
TSC_ID: int  # A testing server, Tofu Soup Congress

vinlin24/tacobot-public