Having your own Discord Bot can be a nice way of adding a custom experience to your users on the server. There are a couple of things to take into consideration when you want a Discord Bot on your server. You can first of course look if your needs are met by a bot from https://top.gg/. Otherwise you can write your own and for that there are more things to consider.
Things you need to consider
- Which language is the bot written in?
- How do you want to host it? What matters to you?
- personal support
- uptime
- monitoring
There are popular languages to write your bot in, some of the popular are
- Java
- Python
- NodeJS.
The common ways to setup a Discord Bot can be
- VPS on your own
- External hosting provider, in fact that’s exactly what we can help you with. Check out our process and pipeline for deploying the Heaplevel Discord bot here.
- Locally on your desktop
Let’s start with the first one VPS. How is the process to get the bot up and running usually?
VPS
- Setup VPS by registering a new account at a hosting provider
- Login to the VPS and access the terminal
- Install the programming environment necessary. This depends on which language you have written your bot in. It could be Python, NodeJS, Java or anything else.
- The code. You need a way to transfer the code to the actual VPS machine. Either it’s on a code repository like Github or Bitbucket. Or you can transfer it via some UI file manager. Check with your provider.
- When you have the code locally, it’s smart to test run it. this step verifies that you have all the necessary tools for your bot to run. How you do that depends on your code base again. This is probably something you’ve already tried when developing the code locally on your own desktop machine.
- If you have verified the code works then it’s time to setup the code to run your server. You can either run your main file as a standalone process, setup a cronjob or write a containerized version of it (link to Docker article – How to run a Docker discord bot).
- This step is ususally skipped but if you have the chance to monitor the resource usage on the server it’s a major plus.
- Handle updates to the code
- Handle bot crashes – due to usage utilization or anything else
With these things we can also support you if you run into problems.
Discord Bot on a external hosting provider
While the registration part is usually the same as for VPS, the real advantage is that an external hosting provider will provide you with an interface for uploading your code and run it. Usually there is an amount of support included in your account. A good hosting provider will allow you to just point to a repository on GitHub or BitBucket for example instead of you manually uploading the files to the server.
The steps are usually
- Register your account with the Discord bot hosting provider
- Upload your files
- Start the bot through the provider’s integrated interface
Discord Bot locally on your desktop
Let’s say you have a little desktop machine laying there without a purpose, you can use it as your local little server. This scenario can look different depending on your setup. But it’s closest to preparing your VPS for Discord Bot. You will need the following
- Development environment for the language the bot is written in
- Some scheduling and monitoring mechanism if the Discord bot will crash.
- If you are sure that everything is complete, then you can run the bot through the development environment on the desktop computer.
Summary
We have looked at different options for setting up your Discord Bot. While they look similar, the decision boils down to what’s important for you. The requirements you have will differ to somebody else. Some are happy with no support from their provider while others are happy to outsource that task to someone else. You still need a fair amount of knowledge to setup the Discord bot on the underlying system, usually in Linux you require a little more experience.
If you find yourself in need of discussing this with us then it’s something we can provide support for. Even if you have support from your provider, drop us an email.