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! 🎉

🔑 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>")
        .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>")
                .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.