Discord Bot Boilerplate

A boilerplate to quickly deploy a powerful Discord bots. Quickly and painlessly deploy a powerful, lightweight and extremely easy-to-manage Discord bot for both beginners and expert users. No experience needed.

Features

• 100% free and open source.
• Fully customizable, host on your own server!
• Quick deployment: Get the bot online in > 1 minute.
• Extremely lightweight, less than 1MB.
• Fully commented: Easy for a new developer to understand and navigate.
• Powerful command handler.
• Example commands to expand from.
• Built in !commands and !help commands.
• Bloated, unnecessary, complex, or downright annoying features.
• Complex set-up.
• Premium or paid packages.

How-to / Setup

Prerequisites:

• NodeJS installed on the machine.
• Your Discord bot's token.
• Your Discord bot invited to your server.
• A brain.

1. Download/clone the repo.
2. Duplicate .env.sample and rename it .env.
3. Place your Discord bot's token in .env.
4. Open a Terminal (Console) window, and navigate to your project by using cd /path/to/this/repo.
5. Run npm i to download the dependencies.
6. Run node bot.js to initiate the bot.

Usage

This boilerplate features a quick and powerful commmand handler to dynamically load and manage each command. Commands are stored in the /commands/ folder and have 3 main functions:

• exports.run: The main function of the command.
• exports.help: The descripion of the commands. Appears when a users runs !commands [command].
• exports.aliases: The aliases of the command. A command can be run using it's main name or one of it's aliases. A good example is setting an alias of !balance to !bal so that both commands do the same thing.

Example Command

/commands/examples.js

exports.run = (client, message, args) => {

    // your function

    message.channel.send('This is an example command!')
    console.log('You can run this command with !example, !test, or !admin!')
}

exports.help = 'Just an example command. Usage: `!example`'
exports.aliases = ['test', 'admin']

Upon running a command in the Discord chat, the command handler will intelligently find the command's .js file in the /commands/ folder and run the exports.run function located within it.

Working with the Command Handler

The boilerplate features 2 exports that are extremely useful in dynamically managing your bot's commands:

• client.settings: An object that contains all the information in the bot-setings.json. For example, you can quickly find the bot's prefix by using bot.settings.prefix.
• client.commands: An object that contains all the information and functions for every command. For example, you can pull the help information on a command by using bot.commands['command-name'].help.

This makes it really easy to manage the commands on a global level. To access the bot's scopes from your .js file on a global scale, you'll need to import it using a require somewhere near the top.

const client = require('./client.js')

A good example of this in use is the !commands command, which lists all the available commands the bot has loaded.

exports.run = (client, message, args) => {
    console.log(client.commands)

    message.channel.send(
        `Commands: \`${process.env.BOT_PREFIX}` +
        Object.keys(client.commands).join(`\`, \`${process.env.BOT_PREFIX}`) + '`'
    )
}

exports.help = 'Displays a list of available commands.'
exports.aliases = ['commandlist', 'command']

Commands: !commands, !example, !help

FAQ

How can I change the bot's prefix?

• The prefix is defined in the .env file.

Does this bot moderation feature commands like !purge, !kick, and !ban?

• It does not. This is boilerplate for developers to develop their own commands for their Discord server—not quite a moderation/utility bot.

How can I host my bot when I'm away from my machine, 24/7?

• For that, you'll need to run the program on a remote machine. You'll need a VPS of your own. You can get a VPS for less than $10/month on https://bugplay.com!

Where can I donate?

• You can support UNDERFORUMS on Patreon, send tips to my Bitcoin address (3HFuhH4enDUKFqokiron6jyMSzPVwNHkTW), or send me XLM on Keybase (@youngseebi)!

Can you develop a bot for me?

• I'd love to! Reach out to me if you'd like to hire me.