Quickstart

This page gives a brief introduction to the library. It assumes you have the library installed, if you don’t check the Installing portion.

A Minimal Bot

Let’s make a bot that responds to a slash command and walk you through it.

It looks something like this:

import nextcord
from nextcord.ext import commands

TESTING_GUILD_ID = 123456789  # Replace with your guild ID

bot = commands.Bot()

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'We have logged in as {bot.user}')

@bot.slash_command(description="My first slash command", guild_ids=[TESTING_GUILD_ID])
async def hello(interaction: nextcord.Interaction):
    await interaction.send("Hello!")

bot.run('your token here')

Let’s name this file example_bot.py. Make sure not to name it nextcord as that’ll conflict with the library.

A lot is going on here, so let’s walk you through it step by step.

  1. The first line just imports the library, if this raises a ModuleNotFoundError or ImportError then head on over to Installing section to properly install.

  2. The second line imports the Bot commands framework which allows us to use the Bot class to create our bot.

  3. After that, we will declare a constant called TESTING_GUILD_ID which will be used to identify the guild we want to use. This will allow us to test the command immediately in our server. Without this, we would have to wait up to an hour for the global command to register.

  4. Next, we create an instance of a Bot. This bot is our connection to Discord.

  5. We then use the bot.event decorator to register an event. This library has many events. Since this library is asynchronous, we do things in a “callback” style manner.

    A callback is essentially a function that is called when something happens. In our case, the on_ready() event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up.

  6. Next, we use the bot.slash_command decorator to register a slash command. This decorator can take arguments for configuring the slash commands such as the description and guild IDs where you want the command to be registered. The callback of the slash command takes in an Interaction object as a parameter which can be used to respond to the user. In the callback, we use the method Interaction.send() to reply.

  7. Finally, we run the bot with our login token. If you need help getting your token or creating a bot, look in the Creating a Bot Account section.

Now that we’ve made a bot, we have to run the bot. Luckily, this is simple since this is just a Python script, we can run it directly.

On Windows:

$ py -3 example_bot.py

On other systems:

$ python3 example_bot.py

Now you can try playing around with your basic bot.

You can find more examples in the examples directory on GitHub.