Welcome

This tutorial takes you from nothing to a Discord bot that is online for everyone, one step at a time. It assumes you have never written a bot before. If you know a little JavaScript, you have everything you need; if you have never heard of Discord’s API, intents or slash commands, that is fine too: every word is explained the first time it appears. Read it in order. Each page builds on the one before, and each page ends with a short recap of what you learned and what comes next.

What you will build

Along the way, you write a small bot for a community server. By the end, it:

• answers slash commands like /dice and /whois, with options people fill in;
• welcomes new members and keeps an eye on messages;
• shows buttons, select menus and forms, and reacts when people use them;
• posts a report by itself every morning;
• speaks English and French, depending on who reads it;
• runs on a machine that stays on, for every server that adds it.

Every piece is a file you add to your project. Nothing you write in one chapter has to be rewritten in a later one.

Who this is for

You, if one of these is true:

• You want a bot for your server and you have never written one.
• You know JavaScript (variables, functions, async and await) and want to use it for something real.
• You have used another Discord library and want to understand how ChapterJS thinks, without reading its reference first.

You do not need to know TypeScript. Your files are TypeScript files, but you never write a type yourself: the framework writes them for you, and your editor uses them to underline mistakes before the bot even runs. You will see what that means on the very first command.

How to read it

Every chapter has the same shape:

1. What you are about to do, and why. A bot has moving parts; knowing why a step exists is what lets you remember it.
2. A complete file that works as is. Copy it into your project, save, and try it in your test server. Nothing is left as an exercise.
3. Points of attention. The mistakes everyone makes once, and what the bot tells you when you make them.
4. A recap.

Two other tabs sit next to this one at the top of the page: This tutorial links to both when a detail is worth it. You never need them to follow along.

Where to start

If you have nothing yet, start with the next page, which explains what a bot is and how it talks to Discord. If you already have a Discord application and a test server, you can go straight to Creating the project; the explanations you skip are short, and you can come back to them.