Introduction

This is the documentation for nextcord, a library for Python to aid in creating applications that utilise the Discord API.

Prerequisites

nextcord works with Python 3.8 or higher. Support for earlier versions of Python is not provided. Python 2.7 or lower is not supported. Python 3.7 or lower is not supported.

Installing

You can get the library directly from PyPI:

python3 -m pip install -U nextcord

If you are using Windows and have not installed Python to PATH, then the following should be used instead:

py -3 -m pip install -U nextcord

To get voice support, you should use nextcord[voice] instead of nextcord, e.g.

python3 -m pip install -U nextcord[voice]

On Linux environments, installing voice requires getting the following dependencies:

For a Debian-based system, the following command will get these dependencies:

$ apt install libffi-dev libnacl-dev python3-dev

Remember to check your permissions!

Virtual Environments

Sometimes you want to keep libraries from polluting system installs or use a different version of libraries than the ones installed on the system. You might also not have permission to install libraries system-wide. For this purpose, the standard library as of Python 3.3 comes with a concept called “Virtual Environment”s to help maintain these separate versions.

A more in-depth tutorial is found on Virtual Environments and Packages.

However, for the quick and dirty:

  1. Go to your project’s working directory:

    $ cd your-bot-source
    $ python3 -m venv bot-env
    
  2. Activate the virtual environment:

    $ source bot-env/bin/activate
    

    On Windows you activate it with:

    $ bot-env\Scripts\activate.bat
    
  3. Use pip like usual:

    $ pip install -U nextcord
    

Congratulations. You now have a virtual environment all set up.

Basic Concepts

nextcord revolves around the concept of events. An event is something you listen to and then respond to. For example, when a message happens, you will receive an event about it that you can respond to.

A quick example to showcase how events work:

from nextcord.ext import commands

# the prefix is not used in this example
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix='$')

@bot.event
async def on_message(message):
    print(f'Message from {message.author}: {message.content}')

bot.run('token')