chapter-1-setup.md

Chapter 1 | Setup your bot

What you shoud have by now is an application, made on the discord developer portal.
If you do not know how, please see here

Make sure to have your bot invited to your server so we can test it while coding it.

Tips before we begin

• Keep your bot token safe. People can use this to access your bot. I'll explain it thoroughly here
• Do not give your bot Administrator permissions, this to prevent someone doing bad things with your bot.

Tokens and how to keep them safe

By now you should have a bot token and the bot is in your server.
To be sure not to accidentally leak it, we can keep them safe in an .env file.

This is one of the most standard methods in programming to keep credentials safe is in .env files.
To use this for your token is quite simple, place this inside your .env file to store your token to a key TOKEN

TOKEN = "<YOUR_TOKEN>"

And that's it! To access it in Python, you'll need to do a bit more.

First, you'd need to have python-dotenv module installed using the pip install python-dotenv
or the equivalent from other OSes than Windows.

Having the module installed, import the module and load the file.

from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv("PATH/TO/YOUR/.ENV/FILE") # I recommend to use a relative path

After that, the .env file is loaded. Then you can access the token from it.
For this, we will need os module

from dotenv import load_dotenv
from os import environ

load_dotenv("PATH/TO/YOUR/.ENV/FILE") # I recommend to use a relative path

token = environ.get("TOKEN") # Note that this will return None if it cannot find the TOKEN key

That's it for keeping your token safe! Of course there are other methods, but I'll keep it to this method as it is the one I use for my bot.
NEXT: Chapter 2 | What is Discord?