discord-events

Re-inventing for fun an AWS-backed Discord bot to schedule events.

🕌 Design

Infra

Java bot runs in a ECS-managed Docker image on an EC2 instance. It uses VPC endpoints to store and read into a DynamoDB Table holding the events. These interactions are hidden from the Internet.

Bot

Powered by Discord4J.

Main features

• Manage events (create, view, & delete) for multiple discord servers.

• Attend events using Discord emoji reactions.

Reminder feature

Opt-in feature where a separate thread in the bot checks for events and notifies a channel 15 minutes before it occurs.

🛠 Bot Setup

• Prod bot: Auto-scaled ECS service running the Java app with its own AWS DDB table
• Dev bot: Containerized Java app running locally with its own AWS DDB table

1. You can have two application instances: discord-events-bot for prod and discord-events-bot-test for dev. Create an application and associated bot for each desired instance through Discord developer portal.
2. Enable all Privileged Gateway Intents for each bot on the Discord developer portal.
3. Add each bot to your desired servers with the following link (use CLIENT ID token from developer portal): https://discordapp.com/api/oauth2/authorize?scope=bot&client_id=<YOUR CLIENT ID>.
4. Set env vars in your shell:

   Name	Description
   AWS_ACCOUNT	AWS account ID
   AWS_DEFAULT_REGION	AWS region (ex: us-east-1)
   AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID *	AWS credentials
   AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY *	AWS credentials
   DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN	Bot token from Discord Developer Portal
   DISCORD_EVENTS_ENV	Execution env for discord-events (dev|prod)
   DISCORD_EVENTS_TABLE_NAME	Name your DDB table, the app will differentiate that of dev and prod

* Any AWS credentials setup can replace these for the bot's Java execution.

Switching between prod and dev bots

You can switch bots by changing the following env vars in your shell:

• DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN
• DISCORD_EVENTS_ENV

Aliases should do the trick:

alias botProd="export DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN=<your prod bot token> && export DISCORD_EVENTS_ENV=prod"
alias botDev="export DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN=<your dev bot token> && export DISCORD_EVENTS_ENV=dev"

🤖 Running the bot locally

1. Deploy the CDK dev stack
   1. Switch to your dev bot
   2. cd discord-events-cdk
   3. yarn install && yarn run build
   4. yarn run cdk deploy DiscordEventsDevStack
2. From root dir, docker-compose up

☁ Deploy the bot to AWS

1. Switch to your prod bot
2. cd discord-events-cdk
3. yarn install && yarn run build
4. yarn run cdk deploy DiscordEventsStack

You can always have your CI/CD pipeline deploy the newest version of your bot, just make sure that all the necessary environment variables (as indicated in setup) are set in the pipeline execution.

🤮 Hardcoded stuff

1. Timezone defaulted to Eastern Canada, change in utils/DateUtils.java.

👩🏾‍💻Usage

Command	Example
!create-event [title:str] [date:date] [time:time] [description:str]?
!delete-events [deleteCode:str]*
!my-events
!list-events [[upcoming:num]] [[on:date]] [[from:date] [to:date]]
!remind-events [on/off:str]?
!attend-events
!help-events

📖 Resources

• How to Make a Discord Bot: an Overview and Tutorial