Initial files

Once you add your bot to a server, the next step is to start coding and get it online! Let’s start by creating a config file for your client token and a main file for your bot application.

As explained in the “What is a token, anyway?” section, your token is essentially your bot’s password, and you should protect it as best as possible. This can be done through a config.json file or by using environment variables.

Open your application in the Discord Developer Portal and go to the “Bot” page to copy your token.

Storing data in a config.json file is a common way of keeping your sensitive values safe. Create a config.json file in your project directory and paste in your token. You can access your token inside other files by using require().

Environment variables are special values for your environment (e.g., terminal session, Docker container, or environment variable file). You can pass these values into your code’s scope so that you can use them.

One way to pass in environment variables is via the command line interface. When starting your app, instead of node index.js, use TOKEN=your-token-goes-here node index.js. You can repeat this pattern to expose other values as well.

You can access the set values in your code via the process.env global variable, accessible in any file. Note that values passed this way will always be strings and that you might need to parse them to a number, if using them to do calculations.

Another common approach is storing these values in a .env file. This spares you from always copying your token into the command line. Each line in a .env file should hold a KEY=value pair.

You can use the dotenv package for this. Once installed, require and use the package to load your .env file and attach the variables to process.env:

Git is a fantastic tool to keep track of your code changes and allows you to upload progress to services like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. While this is super useful to share code with other developers, it also bears the risk of uploading your configuration files with sensitive values!

You can specify files that Git should ignore in its versioning systems with a .gitignore file. Create a .gitignore file in your project directory and add the names of the files and folders you want to ignore:

Open your code editor and create a new file. We suggest that you save the file as index.js, but you may name it whatever you wish.

Here’s the base code to get you started:

This is how you create a client instance for your Discord bot and login to Discord. The GatewayIntentBits.Guilds intents option is necessary for your client to work properly, as it ensures that the caches for guilds, channels and roles are populated and available for internal use.

Intents also define which events Discord should send to your bot, and you may wish to enable more than just the minimum. You can read more about the other intents on the Intents topic.

Open your terminal and run node index.js to start the process. If you see “Ready!” after a few seconds, you’re good to go!