Create a Discord Bot in Python

6 min readMay 5, 2022

In this tutorial we will develop our own Discord bot using Python.

The source code for this bot will be stored in my github repository

About the bot

First we will create a basic discord bot that will greet the message sender, and then we will create a Minecraft Bot, that will enable us to do the following:

:: Bot Usage ::
!mc help          : shows help
!mc serverusage   : shows system load in percentage
!mc serverstatus  : shows if the server is online or offline
!mc whoisonline   : shows who is online at the moment

Let’s get into it.

Dependencies

Create a python virtual environment and install the dependent packages:

$ python3 -m virtualenv .venv 
$ source .venv/bin/activate 
$ pip install discord 
$ pip install python-dotenv

Create the Discord Application

We first need to create the application on discord and retrieve a token that our python app will require.

Create a application on discord:

https://discordapp.com/developers/applications

You should see:

Click “New Application” and provide it a name:

Once you create the application you will get a screen to upload a logo, provide a description and most importantly get your application id as well as your public key:

Then select the Bot section:

Then select “Add Bot”:

Select OAuth2 and select the “bot” scope:

At the bottom of the page it will provide you with a URL that looks something like:

https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=xxxxxxxxxxx&permissions=0&scope=bot

Paste the link in your browser and authorize the bot to your server of choice:

Then click authorize, and you should see your bot appearing on Discord:

Developing the Discord Bot

Now we will be building our python discord bot, head back to the “Bot” section and select “Reset Token”, then copy and store the token value to a file .env:

DISCORD_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxx

So in our current working directory, we should have a file .env with the following content:

$ cat .env 
DISCORD_TOKEN=your-unique-token-value-will-be-here

For this demonstration, I will create a private channel in discord called minecraft-test and add the bot MinecraftBot to the channel (this is only for testing, after testing you can add your bot to your other channels for other people to use):

For our first test, a basic bot, where we would like to type hello and the bot should greet us by our username, in our mc_discord_bot.py file we will have:

import discord 
import os 
from dotenv import load_dotenv  BOT_NAME = "MinecraftBot"
load_dotenv() DISCORD_TOKEN = os.getenv("DISCORD_TOKEN") 
bot = discord.Client()@bot.event async def on_ready():
    print(f'{bot.user} has logged in.')@bot.event async
def on_message(message): 
    if message.author == bot.user: 
        return 
    if message.content == 'hello': 
        await message.channel.send(f'Hey {message.author}') 
    if message.content == 'goodbye': 
        await message.channel.send(f'Goodbye {message.author}')  bot.run(DISCORD_TOKEN)

Then run the bot:

$ python mc_discord_bot.py 
MinecraftBot has logged in.

And when we type hello and goodbye you can see our bot responds on those values:

Now that we tested our bot, we can clear the mc_discord_bot.py and write our minecraft bot, the requirements of this bot is simple, but we would like the following:

use the command !mc to trigger our bot and subcommands for what we want
able to see who is playing minecraft on our server at the moment
able to get the status if the minecraft server is online
able to get the server load percentage (as the bot runs on the minecraft server)

This is our complete mc_discord_bot.py:

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import requests
import os
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import random
import multiprocessing# Variables
BOT_NAME = "MinecraftBot"
load_dotenv()
DISCORD_TOKEN = os.getenv("DISCORD_TOKEN")minecraft_server_url = "lightmc.fun" # this is just an example, and you should use your own minecraft serverbot_help_message = """
:: Bot Usage ::
`!mc help`                   : shows help
`!mc serverusage`   : shows system load in percentage
`!mc serverstatus` : shows if the server is online or offline
`!mc whoisonline`   : shows who is online at the moment
"""available_commands = ['help', 'serverusage', 'serverstatus', 'whoisonline']# Set the bot command prefix
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")# Executes when the bot is ready
@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'{bot.user} succesfully logged in!')# Executes whenever there is an incoming message event
@bot.event
async def on_message(message):
    print(f'Guild: {message.guild.name}, User: {message.author}, Message: {message.content}')
    if message.author == bot.user:
        returnif message.content == '!mc':
        await message.channel.send(bot_help_message)if 'whosonline' in message.content:
        print(f'{message.author} used {message.content}')
    await bot.process_commands(message)# Executes when the command mc is used and we trigger specific functions
# when specific arguments are caught in our if statements
@bot.command()
async def mc(ctx, arg):
    if arg == 'help':
        await ctx.send(bot_help_message)if arg == 'serverusage':
        cpu_count = multiprocessing.cpu_count()
        one, five, fifteen = os.getloadavg()
        load_percentage = int(five / cpu_count * 100)
        await ctx.send(f'Server load is at {load_percentage}%')if arg == 'serverstatus':
        response = requests.get(f'https://api.mcsrvstat.us/2/{minecraft_server_url}').json()
        server_status = response['online']
        if server_status == True:
            server_status = 'online'
        await ctx.send(f'Server is {server_status}')if arg == 'whoisonline':
        response = requests.get('https://api.mcsrvstat.us/2/{minecraft_server_url}').json()
        players_status = response['players']
        if players_status['online'] == 0:
            players_online_message = 'No one is online'
        if players_status['online'] == 1:
            players_online_username = players_status['list'][0]
            players_online_message = f'1 player is online: {players_online_username}'
        if players_status['online'] > 1:
            po = players_status['online']
            players_online_usernames = players_status['list']
            joined_usernames = ", ".join(players_online_usernames)
            players_online_message = f'{po} players are online: {joined_usernames}'
        await ctx.send(f'{players_online_message}')bot.run(DISCORD_TOKEN)

And now we can start our bot:

$ python mc_discord_bot.py

And we can run our help command:

!mc help

Which will prompt our help message, and then test out the others:

Resources

Thank you to the following authors, which really helped me doing this:

Thank You

Thanks for reading, if you like my content, check out my website, read my newsletter or follow me at @ruanbekker on Twitter.

The source code for this bot will be stored in my github repository: — https://github.com/ruanbekker/discord-minecraft-python-bot

I’ve started a brand new Discord server, not much happening at the moment, but planning to share and distribute tech content and a place for like minded people to hang out. If that’s something you are interested in, feel free to join on this link