Joshua Thompson

Joshua Thompson

Full stack developer with a passion for making things work better

Discord Bot Pipeline - Intro

2 minute read

This post is part 1 of a 10 part series:

A few years back Discord announced support for slash commands. For a while I had been running private discord bots for my friends’ servers using the standard pattern of listening to all messages and reacting to any that start with an exclamation point. For example, I had a bot that was used to easily rename each other that would listen to any messages that begin with !rename.

This works really well for many classes of Discord bots but had clear downsides. For one, bots had to run persistently, which meant either running them on a persistent VM on a cloud provider which costs money, or running them on a spare server at home, like a Raspberry Pi. Although the latter works well and is cheap, I generally want to avoid running services on my local network that are reachable from the internet if I don’t have to. Also, my network isn’t always reliable, due to either internet outages or just issues with my router or cable modem, so downtime using this approach was pretty common.

The solution is to leverage serverless cloud computing infrastructure. I’m the type of developer who likes to spend a lot of time working on infrastructure pipelines for a personal project before even writing any actual code for the project itself, even if it’s something pretty lightweight like a Discord bot. My requirements for the pipeline are:

  • Integration with GitHub
    • Infrastructure code is stored as a GitHub repo
      • Changes to the infrastructure must be done as tested GitHub Pull Requests
    • Bot code is stored as a GitHub repo
      • Updates to the bot’s code are tested and then deployed automatically
      • The repo can store multiple bot projects
    • A single source for logging across all bots
    • Email alerting when bots are having issues

This series of blog posts will cover creation of a pipeline to satisfy all of these requirements, leveraging several key pieces of technology in order to create a fully-fledged infrastructure pipeline for Discord bot development. I will be breaking this down into several posts, each covering different aspects of the pipeline. I will use the following technologies and libraries, although you can mix and match depending on your own preferences.

  • Bot development - Golang using the discordgo library.
    • Any other language can be chosen here, libraries exist for a plethora of languages.
  • Infrastructure as Code - Terraform
    • For simple self-hosted projects, this is unnecessary, but if you want to simplify the process for hosting on a cloud provider, this may be useful.
  • Cloud Computing - GCP
    • AWS or Azure can easily be used here instead
  • Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CICD) - GitHub Actions.
    • Since the repos are already hosted on GitHub this is a natural fit.

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