Discord Bot

Discord Bots was the original use case for Confly. We use it to manage our own Discord Bot and it works great. I have always loved creating Discord Bots and I am excited to share this tutorial with you.

~Julius (opens in a new tab), CEO of Confly

In this short walk-through, we will create a Confly powered Discord Bot using the Discord.js (opens in a new tab) framework on NodeJS (opens in a new tab). You will learn how to use our cli to create and maintain projects, define a confly structure and deploy your config. By the end you will have a fun bot that will respond to your messages and can be easily configured using Confly.

Step 1: Create a basic Discord Bot using Discord.js

Create a directory for your project and run npm init -y to initialize a new node project. Then install the discord.js package using npm install discord.js. You can now create a new file called index.js and add the following code:

Make sure to also create a config.json file and add your Discord Bot token to it:

This bot will listen for the ping message and reply with Pong!. You can now run your bot using node index.js and test it by sending a ping message to your bot in Discord.

As you can see, our bot will respond to the ping message.

But what if we want to change the response? We would have to change the code and redeploy the bot. This is not ideal. We can use Confly to make this easier.

Step 2: Create your confly project

First of all we need to create a Confly project on the Confly Dashboard (opens in a new tab). You can do this by clicking on the + Add Project button in the top right corner of the projects page. Give your project a name and click Create.

We also need an instance for our project. Instances allow you to have multiple configurations for the same project, they represent individual deployments of the same application. For example, you could have a dev instance for development and a prod instance for production without having to create a new project and copy the config structure. This is also useful if you have multiple bots that use the same config structure, for example when creating a Saas product or just deploying multiple bots.

Conveniently new projects come with a default instance called Default Instance. You can create a new instance by clicking on the + Add Instance button in the top right corner of the instances page, but this tutorial, we will use the default instance.

Every instance has a unique secret token that we will use to fetch the config. You view or copy the token by clicking the icons on the instance card respectively. We will need this token for our bot to fetch the config later, so lets add it to our config.json. Click on the clipboard icon to copy it and then add a new line in config.json:

Step 3: Create your config structure

The next step is to tell Confly what our config structure looks like. Our goal is to create two input fields: One for the trigger message (ping) and one for the response message (Pong!). We will also add a checkbox to enable or disable the bot's functionality entirely.

On the project page, go to the Config Structure tab. You will see a category called Main Settings by default. From the library on the right, drag two Text inputs and one Toggle into the category. You can label the fields by hovering over them and opening the settings menu on the right by clicking on the gear icon. You can also change the category name by clicking on title or the gear icon next to it. We will name the category Bot Settings and the inputs Trigger Message, Response Message and Enabled. Your config structure should now look like this:

Your config structure should now look like this:

We also want to specify how these values will be represented in the config. When our application consumes the config, it will receive a JSON object with the values of the inputs. We can specify the keys of this object by clicking on the gear icon next to the input label and changing the Key field. When not specified, the key will be a camel cased version of the label. (e.g. Trigger Message -> triggerMessage). We will change the keys to trigger, response and enabled respectively. This can be done by clicking on the gear icon next to the input label and changing the Key field. (The enabled key is already correct by default, so you don't have to change it)

Our config is now ready to be used. To view the config, you can go back to the Instances tab and click on the Default Instance card. You will see the config editor with the inputs we just created. You can change the values and click Save to save the config.

Step 4: Let your bot use the config

After initializing your confly config project, we need the bot to actually use the dynamic config. To do this, we will use the Confly NodeJS SDK (opens in a new tab). Install it using $ npm install @confly-dev/confly-js.

Import the getConfig function from the SDK at the top of your index.js file:

const { getConfig } = require("@confly-dev/confly-js");

Our bot should fetch the latest values every time a message is sent to ensure that the config is always up to date. Since the getConfig function is asynchronous, we need to make the messageCreate event handler asynchronous as well. To do this, we will use the async keyword. Your messageCreate event handler should now look like this:

// highlight-start
client.on("messageCreate", async (msg) => {
  // highlight-end
  // ...
});

We can now start using the getConfig function. We will use the await keyword to wait for the config to be fetched. Your messageCreate event handler should now look like this:

client.on("messageCreate", async (msg) => {
  // highlight-start
  const confly = await getConfig(config.confly_token);
  // highlight-end
  // ...
});

Now that we have our config, we can use it in our bot. We will update our ping message handler to use the config. Your messageCreate event handler should now look like this:

client.on("messageCreate", async (msg) => {
  const confly = await getConfig(config.confly_token);
 
  // highlight-start
  if (!confly.enabled) return;
  if (msg.content === confly.trigger) {
    msg.reply(confly.response);
    // highlight-end
  }
});

Now lets add a output to log the config on startup. This will help us to see if the config is fetched correctly. Your ready event handler should now look like this:

client.on("ready", () => {
  console.log(`Logged in as ${client.user.tag}!`);
 
  getConfig(config.confly_token).then((confly) => {
    console.log("Current confly config: ", confly);
  });
});

And one last thing to make the bot a little safer to use. We will add a check to make sure that the bot doesn't reply to itself or other bots. Your messageCreate event handler should now look like this:

client.on("messageCreate", async (msg) => {
  if (msg.author.bot) return;
  const confly = await getConfig(config.confly_token);
 
  if (!confly.enabled) return;
  if (msg.content === confly.trigger) {
    msg.reply(confly.response);
  }
});

const Discord = require("discord.js");
const { getConfig } = require("@confly-dev/confly-js");
const config = require("./config.json");
 
const client = new Discord.Client({
  intents: ["Guilds", "DirectMessages", "GuildMessages", "MessageContent"],
  partials: [Discord.Partials.Message, Discord.Partials.Channel],
});
 
client.on("ready", () => {
  console.log(`Logged in as ${client.user.tag}!`);
  getConfig(config.confly_token).then((confly) => {
    console.log("Current confly config: ", confly);
  });
});
 
client.on("messageCreate", async (msg) => {
  if (msg.author.bot) return;
  const confly = await getConfig(config.confly_token);
 
  if (!confly.enabled) return;
  if (msg.content === confly.trigger) {
    msg.reply(confly.response);
  }
});
 
client.login(config.discord_token);

Next steps

Now that you have created your first bot, you can start using Confly to manage your config. You can also check our other examples to learn more use cases for Confly.

Conclusion

We have now created a Discord bot that uses Confly to manage its config. You can now use this bot as a template for your own projects. The code for this tutorial can be found on GitHub (opens in a new tab).

If you have any questions, feel free to join our Discord server (opens in a new tab) or open an issue (opens in a new tab) on GitHub, and we will be happy to help you out. You can also contact our support team directly (opens in a new tab). We will be happy to help you ASAP.

Thanks for reading!

~ Julius

Credit

• Thanks to Shatter_007#6028 for pointing out a mistake with const variable reassignment.
• Thanks to Lopfi (opens in a new tab) for noticing a bug where the bot would reply to itself.