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 specific message and walk you through it.

It looks something like this:

import stoat

client = stoat.Client()

@client.on(stoat.ReadyEvent)
async def on_ready(event, /):
    print(f'We have logged in as {event.me.tag}')

@client.on(stoat.MessageCreateEvent)
async def on_message(event, /):
    message = event.message

    if message.author.relationship is stoat.RelationshipStatus.user:
        return

    if message.content.startswith('$hello'):
        await message.channel.send('Hello!')

client.run('your token here')

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

There’s a lot 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. Next, we create an instance of a Client. This client is our connection to Stoat.

  3. We then use the Client.on() 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 ReadyEvent event is called when the bot has finished logging in and setting things up and the MessageCreateEvent event is called when the bot has received a message.

  4. Since the MessageCreateEvent event triggers for every message received, we have to make sure that we ignore messages from ourselves. We do this by comparing User.relationship value to RelationshipStatus.user.

  5. Afterwards, we check if the Message.content starts with '$hello'. If it does, then we send a message in the channel it was used in with 'Hello!'. This is a basic way of handling commands, which can be later automated with the stoat.ext.commands – Bot commands framework framework.

  6. 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.