Javacord

Writing your first bot

After you have successfully added Javacord as a dependency, created a bot user, and got its token, you are now ready to create your first simple bot! 🎉

❗ Enabling required intents

By default, all non-privileged intents are enabled. To receive the message content, attachments, components, and embeds you need a special privileged intent MESSAGE_CONTENT. To enable this privileged intent please see the Gateway Intents wiki article.

Slash Commands

Generally it is recommended to use Slash Commands instead of text commands because they offer many advantages like auto-completion, fixed and optional arguments, different kind of arguments with built-in types: numbers(with ranges), text, channel and a lot more.

🔑 Log the bot in

Everything starts with the DiscordApiBuilder class. It is used to create a DiscordApi object which is the most important class of your bot.

DiscordApi api = new DiscordApiBuilder()
        .setToken("<your super secret token>")
        .addIntents(Intent.MESSAGE_CONTENT)
        .login().join();

After executing this code, you should already see your bot online in Discord. Of course, just being online is not enough, so let's add some more code!

👂 Adding a listener

After you got your api instance, let's continue by adding a listener that answers every !ping message with a simple Pong!.

api.addMessageCreateListener(event -> {
    if (event.getMessageContent().equalsIgnoreCase("!ping")) {
        event.getChannel().sendMessage("Pong!");
    }
});

👩‍🔧 Putting it all together

A good place for your code is the main(...) method that every executable Java program must have. Your complete class may look like this:

public class MyFirstBot {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Log the bot in
        DiscordApi api = new DiscordApiBuilder()
                .setToken("<your super secret token>")
                .addIntents(Intent.MESSAGE_CONTENT)
                .login().join();

        // Add a listener which answers with "Pong!" if someone writes "!ping"
        api.addMessageCreateListener(event -> {
            if (event.getMessageContent().equalsIgnoreCase("!ping")) {
                event.getChannel().sendMessage("Pong!");
            }
        });
    }

}

Congratulations, that's already everything you have to know for the beginning. Now, you can play around a little bit by exploring other listeners and methods. Or you just continue reading articles in the Basic Tutorials category.