HonkBot

A bot written for 15-122's Discord server (started in Spring 2021).

Quickstart

Setting up the repository

• Make sure that Python 3 and pip are installed and up-to-date (refer to platform-appropriate resources for more information).
• Fork this repository, clone it locally, and run pip install -r requirements.txt in the repository directory. This will install the libraries need to work with the Discord API and Heroku Redis.

Setting up in Discord Developer Portal

• Log into a Discord account through the Discord Developer Portal and create a "New Application" with whatever metadata you want (bot name, profile picture, description).
• Go to the "Bot" tab in the left sidebar and click "Add Bot", then confirm the action.
• Scroll down in the resulting options, then uncheck "Public Bot" (so that the bot can't be added by others), check "Server Members Intent" (so that the bot can manage roles of students), and check "Administrator" under "Bot Permissions".
• Go to the OAuth tab in the left sidebar, scroll down, and select the "bot" option. Once this has been done, a copyable link will show up---this is the link you will use to invite the bot to your server(s).

Setting up on Heroku

(Note: you will probably want to have a Heroku account with a verified payment method in order to have 1000 free dyno hours per month, letting you run your bot without worrying about exceeding the base limit of 550 hours.)

• Log into Heroku and create a new app.
• Go to the "Resources" tab and add the add-on Heroku Redis.
• Head over to the "Deploy" tab and connect the Heroku app to your forked repository.

Pulling necessary credentials

You will need two pieces of information: a Discord authorization token and a Redis authorization token.

• For Discord, under the "Bot" tab, select "Click to Reveal Token".
• For Heroku Redis, go to the "Resources" tab, click on "Heroku Redis" in the list of add-ons, then go to the "Settings" tab and hit "View Credentials". The information you will want is the URI.
• Locally, make a file named .env in the root directory of your cloned repository, add the tokens using the following format, and save the file.

DISCORD_TOKEN=XXXXXXXX...
REDIS_TOKEN=redis://:XXXXXXXX...

• On Heroku, go to the "Settings" tab, scroll down and "Reveal Config Vars", then add the above tokens.

Testing locally

Once all the above setup has been done, you can test your bot locally by running python HonkBot.py in the terminal.

Deploying on Heroku

Go to the "Deploy" tab, scroll all the way down, and select "Deploy Branch".

Administrivia

1. Once the TA roster is finalized and the Discord server is appropriately setup, TAs can be added to the roster by running the following command, where the <taX> placeholders are Andrew IDs of TAs for that semester. The list can be delimited by spaces or newlines (note that the demonstrated command allows you to copypaste directly from a spreadsheet).

!add_staff
<ta0>
<ta1>
<ta2>
...

2. Before the Discord invite link is given to students, make sure to pull the student roster and run a similar command, where the <studentX> placeholders are Andrew IDs of TAs for that semester.

!add_student
<student0>
<student1>
<student2>
...

3. Note that due to student add/drops and waitlist updates, the roster inevitably will change. After running diff on rosters to check which students have enrolled and dropped, use the commands !add_student and !remove_student respectively to update the Redis database.
4. More robust configuration options coming soon!