BuddieBot

A Homemade Discord Bot for Golang practice and development...also for funsies.

About • Features • Installation • Setting Up • Terms • Release Notes • License • Credits

About

BuddieBot is an open source Discord bot written in Golang that I initially created to develop and maintain new Golang technologies and practices. What originally started as a fun idea and grown into a full personal pet project. I love working on BuddieBot to improve it with new features and utilities all the time. I enjoy using BuddieBot in my personal servers and plan to continue growing this bot for the foreseeable future!

If you liked this repository, feel free to leave a star ⭐ to help promote BuddieBot!

Features

130+ commands and counting!

BuddieBot also comes packed with a variety of features, such as:

• Play/Stop/Queue music from YouTube links
• Receive your daily Horoscope
• Insult your friends
• Slash Commands!
• Moderator only commands
• Manipulate Text
• GAMES!
• And much more!

Installation

You can invite BuddieBot to your server with the [Temporarily Removed] link. 🤖😁 Alternatively, you can clone this repo and host the bot yourself.

git clone https://github.com/Beamer64/BuddieBot.git

After cloning, run an

go get ./...

to snag all the dependencies.

Setting Up

You have to create a config.yaml file in order to run the bot (you can use the example file provided as a base). Your file should look something like this:

# Tokens/API Keys
keys:
  prodBotToken:   ""
  testBotToken:   ""
  webHookToken:   ""
  botPublicKey:   ""
  steamAPI:       "http://api.steampowered.com/ISteamApps/GetAppList/v0002/?key=STEAMKEY&format=json"
  affirmationAPI: "https://www.affirmations.dev/"
  kanyeAPI:       "https://api.kanye.rest/"
  adviceAPI:      "https://api.adviceslip.com/advice"
  doggoAPI:       "https://api.thedogapi.com/v1/images/search"
  wyrAPI:         "https://would-you-rather-api.abaanshanid.repl.co/"

# IDs relating to Discord or Bot
discordIDs:
  currentBotAppID:     "" # Don't set. This gets set later.
  prodBotAppID:        ""
  testBotAppID:        ""
  masterGuildID:       ""
  testGuildID:         ""
  webHookID:           ""
  errorLogChannelID:   ""
  eventNotifChannelID: ""
  # Discord user IDs of bot maintainers — empowered to run owner-only
  # commands like $release and $test. Add yourself before first run.
  botOwnerIDs:
    - ""

# Custom Settings
settings: {}

Sections like "database" and various "IDs" are used for specfic functions or features. This can be omitted if unused. That part of the bot just wont work until supplied.

Visit the Discord developer portal to create an app and use the client token you are given for the token option. To get keys for supported APIs, visit:

• Tenor API

After your config.yaml file is built, you have to enable Privileged Intents on your Discord developer portal. You can find these intents under the "Bot" section, and there are two ticks you have to switch on. For more information on Gateway Intents, check out this link.

Once done, feel free to launch BuddieBot using the command go run cmd/discord-bot/main.go.

Audio (Lavalink) — required for $play / $stop

Audio playback is handled by Lavalink, a Java-based audio service. The bot doesn't open its own voice connection — Lavalink does, which is what gives the bot DAVE/E2EE voice support. In debug mode the bot spawns Lavalink as a child process automatically; in production you run Lavalink as a separate service alongside the bot.

Dev setup (one-time, on your coding PC)

1. Install Java 17+:
   • Windows: winget install Microsoft.OpenJDK.21
   • Linux: sudo apt install openjdk-21-jre-headless
   • Verify with java -version.
2. Create a lavalink/ directory at the repo root.
3. Download Lavalink.jar from the latest 4.x release into lavalink/.
4. Create lavalink/application.yml:

server:
  port: 2333
  address: 127.0.0.1   # localhost-only — never expose this port

plugins:
  youtube:
    enabled: true
    allowSearch: true
    allowDirectVideoIds: true
    allowDirectPlaylistIds: true
    clients:
      - MUSIC
      - ANDROID_VR
      - WEB
      - WEBEMBEDDED

lavalink:
  plugins:
    - dependency: "dev.lavalink.youtube:youtube-plugin:1.13.5"
      repository: "https://maven.lavalink.dev/releases"
  server:
    password: "youshallnotpass"
    sources:
      youtube: false   # built-in YouTube is deprecated; the plugin above replaces it
      soundcloud: true
      bandcamp: true
      twitch: true
      vimeo: true
      http: true
      local: false

logging:
  level:
    root: INFO
    lavalink: INFO

1. The first debug launch is slow (~30s) while Lavalink downloads the YouTube plugin from Maven. Subsequent launches are fast.

When you run the bot in your debugger, it auto-spawns Lavalink and reaps the Java child on shutdown (signal-based on graceful stop; OS-level mechanisms — Pdeathsig on Linux, Job Objects on Windows — handle hard kills). If a stuck Java process ever survives, kill it manually:

• Windows: taskkill /IM java.exe /F
• Linux: pkill -f Lavalink.jar

Production deployment (same host as the bot)

The bot and Lavalink run as two independent processes on the same machine. Run Lavalink as a systemd unit:

# /etc/systemd/system/lavalink.service
[Unit]
Description=Lavalink
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=lavalink
WorkingDirectory=/opt/lavalink
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -Xmx512M -jar Lavalink.jar
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Lavalink stays bound to 127.0.0.1, so the port is never reachable from outside the host — no firewall rules needed. Resource budget: ~256–512 MB RAM on top of whatever the bot uses. The bot's lavalink: config in config.yaml points at 127.0.0.1:2333 (same as dev). Bot updates and Lavalink updates are independent — restarting one doesn't require restarting the other.

To-Do

BuddieBot is in a continuous state of development. New features/updates may come at any time. Some pending ideas are:

• Games
• Be Funnier
• Skip songs
• Multiple Music Sources
• Rename Repo
• DM Your Mother
• Custom tag/reaction system
• Server specific settings
• BuddieBot Website
• Txt commands

Terms

• Guild - This is what Discord refers to your server as. Servers are 'Guilds'.
• botToken - Given when a new bot is created. Located in the Bot section of the Discord Dev portal.
• webHookToken - Can be easily found in the Webhook URL.††
• botPublicKey - Given when a new bot is created. Located in the Gen Info section of the Discord Dev portal.
• webHookID - Can be easily found in the Webhook URL.††
• errorLogChannelID - The ID of the Channel you'd like the bot to update with any errors it encounters.†
• botPrefix - The prefix given when the bot recognizes a command. For example, the one I use is '$'.
• botOwnerIDs - Discord user IDs of bot maintainers. Members in this list can run owner-only commands ($release, $test). To grab your ID: enable Developer Mode in Discord, then right-click your name → Copy User ID.

† To get the ID's of things in Discord, you will need to Enable Dev Mode in Discord.

†† You will need to Create a Webhook in Discord first. Then the ID and Token respectively can be found in the Webhook URL. E.g. https://discord.com/api/webhooks/WEBHOOK_ID/WEBHOOK_TOKEN

Release Notes

Release notes (when updated) can be found in the res folder of the project or at: https://github.com/Beamer64/BuddieBot/blob/master/res/release.md

License

Released under the GNU GPL v3 license.

TOS

The Terms of Service for BuddieBot can be found Here.

Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy for BuddieBot can be found Here.

Credits

This is just a list of various credits to any person(s) whose work are contributed to this open source project.

To give credit where credit is due 😁

The Tenor API is used to deliver gifs from the BuddieBot. The website can be found here. The API site can be found here.

The horoscope.com daily horoscopes are used to allow our BuddieBot to deliver a daily horoscope to our users. The website can be found here.