discord-bridge 1.0.0a4

HTTP bridge for the Discord API

discord-bridge

THIS IS WORK-IN-PROGRESS - Not released for production use yet

HTTP bridge for the Discord API

Contents

• Overview
• Features
• Examples
• Installation
• Updating
• Server configuration
• FAQ
• Change Log

Overview

The current Discord API provides a way to send direct messages to users via Websockets.

However, some applications do not directly support Websockets, which makes it difficult to implement a feature for sending direct messages. For example many Django sites only directly support the HTTP protocol.

Django Bridge solves this problem by allowing applications to send direct messages to Discord users with an HTTP API. This is accomplished by providing two main components:

• server: A microservice that provides a HTTP API for sending direct messages and channel messages to Discord
• client: A Python library, which provides easy access to the microservice API through a wrapper class for Python apps (optional)

Note
While Discord Bridge has been initially developed as helper for Alliance Auth / Django apps, it has no Django dependencies and will work with any app that can use the HTTP API.

Features

• HTTP API for sending direct messages to users and guild channels
• Client library in Python for easy access to the HTTP API
• Microservice is fully configurable and has logging
• Solid test coverage

Examples

Here is an example that shows how simple it is to send a direct message to a Discord user with the provided client library.

from discordbridge.client import WebClient

client = WebClient()
client.send_direct_message(user_id=1234, content="Hello there!")

Installation

Installation for Alliance Auth

This section explains how to install Discord Bridge as companion app for an Alliance Auth installation.

Install from PyPI

Make sure you are in the virtual environment (venv) of your Alliance Auth installation. Then install the newest release from PyPI:

pip install discord-bridge

Update supervisor configuration

Next we need to setup the server of Discord Bridge. It is designed to run as another program with supervisor, just like celery and gunicorn.

For that add the following new section to your supervisor.conf. Use the DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN from your existing installation as TOKEN. You find that token in your local.py settings file:

[program:discordbridge]
command=/home/allianceserver/venv/auth/bin/discordbridgesrv --token "TOKEN"
directory=/home/allianceserver/myauth/log
user=allianceserver
numprocs=1
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopwaitsecs=120
stdout_logfile=/home/allianceserver/myauth/log/discordbridgesrv_out.log
stderr_logfile=/home/allianceserver/myauth/log/discordbridgesrv_err.log

Note
It is not necessary to add this program to your existing myauth supervisor group, since it has no dependencies to Auth and therefore does not need to be restarted with it.

Start the server

Now we just need to tell supervisor to reload the new configuration and it will automatically start the server.

supervisorctl reload

Updating

To update your existing installation you first need to enable your virtual environment. Then run the following commands:

pip install -U discord-bridge
supervisorctl restart discordbridge

Server configuration

The microservice is designed to run via supervisor and can be configured with the below arguments. It comes with sensible defaults and will in most cases only need the Discord bot token to operate.

To configure your server just add/modify one of the below parameters in the respective command line of your supervisor.conf:

usage: discordbridgesrv [-h] [--token TOKEN] [--host HOST] [--port PORT]
                        [--log-level {INFO,WARN,ERROR,CRITICAL}]
                        [--log-file-path LOG_FILE_PATH] [--version]

Server with HTTP API for sending messages to Discord

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --token TOKEN         Discord bot token. Can alternatively be specified as
                        environment variable DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN. (default:
                        None)
  --host HOST           server host address (default: 127.0.0.1)
  --port PORT           server port (default: 9876)
  --log-level {INFO,WARN,ERROR,CRITICAL}
                        Log level of log file (default: INFO)
  --log-file-path LOG_FILE_PATH
                        Path for storing the log file. If no path if provided,
                        the log file will be stored in the current working
                        folder (default: None)
  --version             show the program version and exit

FAQ

I am already using the Auth bot token for another bot. Can I still use it for Discord Bridge or do I need to create a new bot token?

• You can use the same bot token for multiple Discord bots at the same time, so you do not need to create another bot token.

There already is the AA-Discordbot, that also support direct messaging. Does that not make the Discord Bridge kind of redundant?

• No. Some people may not need a Discord bot and therefore would not want to install and maintain a large and heavily integrated bot like AA-Discordbot on their system, only to enable some apps to use direct messaging. A tiny microservice that only adds that needed functionality and is also very easy to install and maintain is therefore often a better solution.