juniorguru-chick

A real-time, synchronous junior.guru Discord bot.

Purpose

All junior.guru automation happens asynchronously (with up-to-24h delay), except of the following tasks provided by this bot:

Creating threads in #past-vedle-pasti
Creating threads in #můj-dnešní-objev
Reacting to member-made threads in #práce-inzeráty
Reacting to member-made threads in #práce-hledám
Creating threads in #ahoj
Greeting new members in #ahoj
Saving pins to members' DMs #13

Please, update the above list if adding features.

Design decisions

The original, asynchronous bot installs and uses this codebase to run the same code and perform the same tasks, idempotently:

If this bot crashes, the asynchronous bot will do the same stuff, just slower.
The purpose of this bot is to provide non-critical progressive enhancement, which can be dropped at any moment.
To keep the architecture simple, this bot should have no state. There should be no database. It should only react to the state and events of the Discord server, and write to the Discord server.
The asynchronous bot should monitor whether this bot is up and running. If it's not, it should fail the build, but non-critically (similar to checking broken links).

Installation

You'll need poetry installed.
Clone this repository: git clone git@github.com:juniorguru/juniorguru-chick.git
Go to the project directory: cd juniorguru-chick
Install the project: poetry install

Development

Set the DISCORD_API_KEY environment variable to your Discord bot token. Using direnv might help setting environment variables automatically in your shell when you navigate to the project directory.
Run poetry run jgc to start the bot.
Press Ctrl+C to stop the bot.

Deployment

The bot is deployed to fly.io. Everything related to deployment is in the Dockerfile. There's also fly.toml, but that's something the flyctl has generated and only they know what it is good for.

There is no need to deploy this bot manually. Everything merged to the main branch of the GitHub repo gets automatically deployed to Fly.

For this to work, the output of flyctl auth token must be set as FLY_API_TOKEN secret in the GitHub repo settings. The rest of the setup is in .github/workflows/build.yml.

If you insist to deploy manually from your local machine, follow these steps:

Have a hobby account at fly.io.
Have a flyctl installed and be logged in.
Set the environment variable using flyctl secrets set DISCORD_API_KEY=...
Run flyctl launch in the project directory.
Run flyctl deploy if not deployed already.

Inspired by Hosting a Python Discord Bot for Free with Fly.io by Jonah Lawrence.

juniorguru / chick