Starting The Bot

So you installed the library and have your bot token ready, great!

Now I’d suggest you make a folder and then make a file called main.py or bot.py or whatever you want to call your main script file but before that we need to get our enviroment set up (or that’s atleast what I’d do) so go ahead and install python-dotenv if you haven’t already using this command:

$ pip install python-dotenv

Nice, now add your token to your .env file, it should be in the same folder as your script file.

Let’s say that your token is qwertyuiop1234567890 and you want to put it in your .env file, you’d do this:

TOKEN=qwertyuiop1234567890

Cool, now open your main script file and write the following, I’ll explain it all in just a second:

import dotenv
import voltage

client = voltage.Client()

@client.listen("message")
async def on_message(message):
    if message.content == "!ping":
        await message.reply("Pong!")

dotenv.load_dotenv()
client.run(os.getenv("TOKEN"))

Alright so to explain what’s going on, first we import the dotenv library to be able to access our enviroment and voltage,

Next we initialize our bot client using the voltage.Client class.

Then we registered a decorator using the voltage.Client.listen() decorator, we passed in the message event to listen for when a message is sent.

We then defined an asynchronous function called on_message tho it doesn’t really matter what you call it, what matters however is that it expects one parameter which is the message object.

After that we check if the message’s content is equal to !ping, if it is we reply with Pong!.

Then we load the enviroment using the dotenv.load_dotenv() function and then run the client using the voltage.Client.run() method.

Now if you run this code your bot should go online and if you were to type !ping it will reply to your message with Pong!

Great, we have finally made our bot, now what?

Next up we will go into more detail about how to use the voltage library and it’s various classes, functions and so on!