Build a Discord Bot in Python That Plays Music and Send GIFs

With the full source code so you can build one yourself too

Our bot playing music on Discord — Image by author

In this tutorial, we’ll make a discord bot that can play music in the voice channels. Discord is an instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities. Users can easily enter chat rooms, initiate video calls, and create multiple groups for messaging friends.

We’ll skip the basics and jump straight over to the music playing part. Check out the following Medium article to catch up on the basics of setting up your bot:

How to make a discord bot with python

The final result, our bot playing music on the voice channel, will look like this:

Our bot playing music on Discord — Image by author

One note before we dive in: remember to allow Administrator permissions for the bot.

Part 1: Importing all the libraries

First, create a virtual environment and install the requirements.

First let's set up the .env file for our project. Create a .env file so that we can separate the environment configuration variables (these are variables whose values are set outside the program) from the main code.

Then import all the needed libraries in the main file app.py:

The module youtube_dl is an open-source download manager for video and audio content from YouTube and other video hosting websites.

Now we need to set intents for our bot. Intents allow a bot to subscribe to specific buckets of events, allowing developers to choose which events the bot listens to and to which it doesn’t. For example, sometimes we want the bot to listen to only messages and nothing else.

Part 2: Using youtube_dl to download audio

The next step is dealing with the part that actually downloads the audio file from the video link we provide. Please note that this bo is just a demonstration. It’s not illegal to download from YouTube for personal use according to this article, but it might be against the YouTube Terms Of Service. Please be sensible and use this for personal use only.

Code for audio extraction using YTDL library: https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py/blob/master/examples/basic_voice.py

The from_url() method of YTDLSource class takes in the URL as a parameter and returns the filename of the audio file which gets downloaded. You can read the youtube_dl documentation at their GitHub repository.

Code for audio extraction using YTDL library: https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py/blob/master/examples/basic_voice.py

Part 3: Adding bot commands

Now let's add the join() method to tell the bot to join the voice channel and the leave() method to tell the bot to disconnect:

Here we first check if the user who wants to play music has already joined the voice channel or not. If not, we tell the user to join first.

Awesome! Give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve reached this far! You’re doing great.

Next, we’ll add the following methods:

• play()
• pause()
• resume()
• stop()

At this point, we need to have the ffmpeg binary in the base directory. It can be downloaded from https://ffmpeg.org/. In this case, I used the exe since I’m using a Windows machine.

Part 4: Deploying the bot locally

Add the final piece of code to start the bot and it’s done:

To deploy the bot locally, activate the virtual environment and run the app.py file.

(venv1) C:\Github\Discord-Bot>python app.py

Bonus: send gifs on start-up and print server details

In this bonus section, we will set up our bot to listen to events such as start-up.

This example sends a previously downloaded GIF image to the text channel when the bot is activated.

To print server details such as owner name, number of users, server id we can add a bot command ‘where_am_i’.

Printing server details — Image by author

You can view and clone the complete results from my Discord-Bot GitHub Repository.

That’s it! Thank you for reading. Don’t hesitate to leave a reply or ask your questions in the comments section.