BulbaBot was designed to fill the role of BulbaGarden's moderation bot for its public Discord server. It is capable of performing moderation tasks such as kicking and banning users, as well as adding roles for personal preferences or moderation. It logs all moderation actions taken, so that you no longer need to rely on the Discord audit logs to review privileged actions.
The bot is built on the Discord.js framework, which runs on Node.js.
Installing BulbaBot is not terribly complicated, but it does require that you create your own bot app in the Discord developer portal. This process is fairly simple and well documented, and you can create your app at https://discord.com/developers/applications. You should also enable developer mode in your settings, to make it easier to get the IDs that you will need for your configuration file.
Once you've created your own bot application, you'll need to create your config.json file with some details about
you server. To get started, copy your includes/config.json.template file into the root of your bot directory and
fill out the values accordingly. Not everything is mandatory, but note that not everything will work
if you don't fill out all the moderation values.
Be absolutely sure that you do not commit your config.json file if you fork this repository. Your token, which is generated when you create your bot's application, is akin to your password. If you upload it, anyone who sees it can log into your bot and use it.
Once you've created your configuration file, you'll need to install nodeJS and the required dependencies.
You can find node at https://nodejs.org. Once you install it, you'll need to navigate to the bot's install directory
and run npm install. That should automatically install all the necessary dependencies.
To start the bot, you'll need to run it with node. You can do this from the command line by navigating to the bot's
install directory and running node index.js, although this will only keep the bot going until your current CLI
session is terminated. Alternatives include using screen to run the bot in its own, detached session (not recommended)
or using systemd to register the bot as a service (highly recommended). This bot has not been tested on Windows
machines, thus there are no effective solutions currently in place for running it in said environments.
Since this bot is in its early stages of development, you can help by providing solutions for Windows environments.
The bot currently has several main moderation functions. This section will break down their functionality and explain their purpose and related configuration settings.
- Kicks, Bans, and Mutes require that the person requesting the action actually has the privileges required. You will need to manually configure your Discord permissions settings for your moderators.
- Mutes actually apply a role which will restrict a user's ability to send messages in the server. Regular Discord mutes are for voice channels, but these are different in that they are designed to prevent users from sending messages in text channels. When a user is muted, an unmute will be scheduled automatically based on the duration given, and this unmute will be rescheduled if the bot is restarted before it occurs. You will need to configure the permissions for this role manually.
logwill write a warning to the database for a specific user, typically used to keep track of times when a moderator speaks officially to inform a user that they are not following the server rules. Actions such as kicks and bans will be logged automatically, and themodlogscommand can be used to view all warnings and moderation actions for a user.- Ignores are designed to allow you to map a group to a role, typically used to ignore notifications from channels that
tend to be particularly lively or which regularly send out pings. Again, the permissions for the roles will need
to be configured manually. The syntax for the command is
ignore (group), which will add the ignore role if it is not present, or remove it if it is. - Stash and pop are used to archive and unarchive channels, respectively. To use this functionality, you will need to create a category to put the archived channels in.
Currently, the bot only produces logs to the console. If you utilize the systemd approach, this works perfectly
because the logs will be written to the journal, making them viewable with journalctl -u (botname).service.
Currently, I would like to add in the ability to log to a file, although this will require adding quite a bit of code.