Windows Guide

Creating your own Discord bot

This guide will show you how to create your own discord bot, invite it to your server, and obtain the credentials needed to run it.

1. Go to the Discord developer application page.
2. Log in with your Discord account.
3. Click New Application.
4. Fill out the Name field however you like, accept the terms, and confirm.
5. Go to the Bot tab on the left sidebar.
6. Click on the Add a Bot button and confirm that you do want to add a bot to this app.
7. Optional: Add bot’s avatar and description.
8. Copy your Token to creds.yml as shown above.
9. Scroll down to the Privileged Gateway Intents section
   • You MUST enable the following:
     • PRESENCE INTENT
     • SERVER MEMBERS INTENT
     • MESSAGE CONTENT INTENT

Inviting your bot to your server

• On the General Information tab, copy your Application ID from your applications page.
• Replace the YOUR_CLIENT_ID_HERE in this link: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID_HERE&scope=bot&permissions=66186303 with your Client ID
• The link should now look something like this: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=123123123123&scope=bot&permissions=66186303
• Access that newly created link, pick your Discord server, click Authorize and confirm with the captcha at the end
• The bot should now be in your server

Windows From Source

Prerequisites

Install these before proceeding or your bot will not work!

• .net 8 - needed to compile and run the bot
• git - needed to clone the repository (you can also download the zip manually and extract it, but this guide assumes you’re using git)
• Redis (OPTIONAL)- to cache things needed by some features and persist through restarts

Installation Instructions

Open PowerShell (press windows button on your keyboard and type powershell, it should show up; alternatively, right click the start menu and select Windows PowerShell), and navigate to the location where you want to install the bot (for example cd ~/Desktop/)

1. git clone https://toastielab.dev/EllieBotDevs/elliebot -b v6 --depth 1
2. cd EllieBot
3. dotnet publish -c Release -o output/ src/EllieBot/
4. cd output
5. cp creds_example.yml creds.yml
6. Open creds.yml with your favorite text editor (Please don’t use Notepad or WordPad. You can use Notepad++, VSCode, Atom, Sublime, or something similar)
7. Enter your bot’s token
8. Run the bot dotnet EllieBot.dll
9. 🎉

Update Instructions

Open PowerShell as described above and run the following commands:

1. Stop the bot

• ⚠️ Make sure you don’t have your database, credentials or any other EllieBot folder open in some application, this might prevent some of the steps from executing succesfully

2. Navigate to your bot’s folder, example:
   • cd ~/Desktop/EllieBot
3. Pull the new version, and make sure you’re on the v6 branch
   • ⚠️ the first 3 lines can be omitted if you’re already on v6. If you’re updating from v5, you must run them
     • git remote set-branches origin '*'
     • git fetch -v --depth=1
     • git checkout v6
   • git pull
   • ⚠️ If this fails, you may want to stash or remove your code changes if you don’t know how to resolve merge conflicts
4. Backup old output in case your data is overwritten
   • cp -r -fo output/ output-old
5. Build the bot again
   • dotnet publish -c Release -o output/ src/EllieBot/
6. Remove old strings and aliases to avoid overwriting the updated versions of those files
   • ⚠ If you’ve modified said files, back them up instead
   • rm output-old/data/aliases.yml
   • rm -r output-old/data/strings
7. Copy old data
   • cp -Recurse .\output-old\data\ .\output\ -Force
8. Copy creds.yml
   • cp output-old/creds.yml output/
9. Run the bot
   • cd output
   • dotnet EllieBot.dll

🎉 Enjoy

Music prerequisites

In order to use music commands, you need ffmpeg and yt-dlp installed.

• ffmpeg-32bit | ffmpeg-64bit - Download the appropriate version for your system (32 bit if you’re running a 32 bit OS, or 64 if you’re running a 64bit OS). Unzip it, and move ffmpeg.exe to a path that’s in your PATH environment variable. If you don’t know what that is, just move the ffmpeg.exe file to EllieBot/output.
• youtube-dlp - Click to download the yt-dlp.exe file, then move yt-dlp.exe to a path that’s in your PATH environment variable. If you don’t know what that is, just move the yt-dlp.exe file to EllieBot/system.