Quickstart#

This page gives a brief introduction to the library. It assumes you have the library installed, if you don’t check the Installing portion.

A Minimal Bot#

Let’s make a bot that responds to a specific message and walk you through it.

It looks something like this:

import defectio

client = defectio.Client()

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'We have logged in as {client.user}')

@client.event
async def on_message(message):
    if message.author == client.user:
        return

    if message.content.startswith('$hello'):
        await message.channel.send('Hello!')

client.run('your token here')

Let’s name this file example_bot.py. Make sure not to name it defectio as that’ll conflict with the library.

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s walk you through it step by step.

  1. The first line imports the library, if this raises a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportError then head over to the Installing section to properly install defectio.

  2. Next, we create an instance of a Client. This client is our connection to Revolt.

  3. We then use the Client.event() decorator to register an event. This library has many events. Since this library is asynchronous, we do things in a “callback” style manner.

    A callback is essentially a function that is called when something happens. In our case, the on_ready() event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up, and the on_message() event is called when the bot has received a message.

  4. Since the on_message() event triggers for every message received, we have to make sure that we ignore messages from ourselves. We do this by checking if the Message.author is the same as the Client.user.

  5. Afterwards, we check if the Message.content starts with '$hello'. If it does, then we send a message in the channel it was used in containing 'Hello!'.

  6. Finally, we run the bot with our login token.

Now that we’ve made a bot, we have to run the bot. Luckily, this is simple since this is just a Python script, so we can run it directly.

On macos/linux:

$ python3 example_bot.py

On Windows:

$ py -3 example_bot.py

Now you can try playing around with your basic bot.