Joshua Thompson

Joshua Thompson

Full stack developer with a passion for making things work better

Discord Bot Pipeline - More Setup

3 minute read

This post is part 8 of a 10 part series:

In the last post in this series, we set up Terraform configs to help us bootstrap our cloud infrastructure for creating new Discord bots. But there are a few other odds and ends we need to take care of before we can finally start writing code!

Creating the Bot in Discord

First, we need to actually create the bot in Discord. Navigate to the Developer Portal and click New Application in the top right corner. It will bring up a dialog asking for a name. Name the bot dalle as shown below:

New Bot

Once created, you can navigate to the General Information tab of your bot and note the Application ID and Publickey shown in the picture below:

Application ID

Connect a GitHub repo to GCP

Now let’s create the code for our bot. First create a new git repository in GitHub like discordbots. Once the repo is created, we want to connect it to Cloud Build such that commits to the repo will result in a new Docker image being pushed. Although we set up our Terraform configs to achieve this, there still is one manual step we need to do. We need to connect our GitHub account to Cloud Build, which will allow Cloud Build to fire off builds on pushes to your GitHub repo. Navigate to the Cloud Build Triggers page and click Connect Repository:

Connect Repository

Select GitHub as the provider. Continuing will result in a GitHub authorization popup. Log in and allow access to Cloud Build.

Connect Repository

If you do not see your repository, click on the Edit Repositories on GitHub button. This can happen if you have the Cloud Build app on GitHub configured to only support connecting to a specified list of repositories. Connect Repository

Create bot infrastructure with Terraform

Once this is complete, let’s go ahead and write up the Terraform config for our new bot. Modify project.tf in your Terraform project and add the following config:

module "dalle-bot" {
  source   = "./modules/discord_bot"
  bot_name = "dalle"
  github_trigger = {
    branch          = "main"
    included_files  = ["dalle/**"]
    repo_owner      = "thompsonja"
    repo_name       = "discordbots"
    cloudbuild_file = "cloudbuild.yaml"
  }
  gcp = {
    additional_roles       = []
    additional_secrets     = ["openai-api-secret"]
    artifact_repository_id = google_artifact_registry_repository.artifact-repo.repository_id
    notification_channels  = [google_monitoring_notification_channel.email-owner.name]
    owner                  = "joshua@thompsonja.com"
    project_id             = google_project.project.project_id
    project_number         = google_project.project.number
    zone                   = var.zone
  }
}

That’s it! A few things to note here:

  • Set repo_owner, repo_name, and owner to match your repository and email
  • This assumes a folder in the repo named dalle, we’ll add this later
  • We are creating an additional GCP secret, openai-api-secret, in order to allow our bot to make requests against our OpenAI account.

Perform the same steps as before, creating a Pull Request on GitHub and merging it. Once it is done, you should be able to see a few secrets in [Secret Manager]. Namely, you should see openai-api-secret and dalle-key.

Setting GCP Secrets

Add your OpenAI API key either through GCP by clicking on the openai-api-secret key and then clicking on the + New Version button, or from the gcloud command-line:

gcloud secrets versions add openai-api-secret --data-file="<path_to_secret>"

Where path_to_secret is a textfile containing the API key. You can generate an API key by navigating to your account on OpenAI.

Similarly, you will want to obtain a new Discord bot key. From your bot’s page, navigate to the Bot page in Settings, and then click on Reset Token, as shown below:

Discord Bot Key Generation

Save this token to a local file and then run:

gcloud secrets versions add dalle-key --data-file="<path_to_secret>"

Whew! That was a decent amount of setup, but in the next post we’ll finally write the code for our bot!

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