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Your program needs a bot account to log in as. This page creates it, and gets the two values your project will ask for: the token of the bot and the ID of your test server. It takes a few minutes, all of it in a browser.

Why two applications

You are about to create an application. Create two, one named after your bot with “dev” in the name (buddy dev), one with the final name (buddy). Here is why, so that you don’t skip it. Slash commands belong to the bot, not to a server. When the production bot registers /dice for everyone, every server it is in sees it, your test server included. If you then change /dice on your computer with the same bot, your test server shows the two versions side by side, and you can’t tell which one you are using. The presence (what the bot shows under its name), the options of the Developer Portal and the daily limits of Discord are shared the same way: what you try on your computer leaks to everyone. With two applications, the dev bot is yours to break, and the production bot never sees what you try. The token of the dev one goes on your computer; the token of the other goes on the machine that will host the bot, much later in this tutorial. Until then, you only use the dev one.

Create the applications

1

Open the Developer Portal

Go to discord.com/developers/applications and sign in with your Discord account.
2

New Application

Click New Application, give it a name, accept the terms, and click Create. The name is what people see in the member list, so choose it with care; it can be changed later.Do it twice: once with “dev” in the name, once without.
3

The Bot page

In the left menu of the dev application, open Bot. This page is the bot account of the application: its username, its avatar, its token, and three options we come back to below.

Copy the token

On the Bot page of the dev application, click Reset Token, confirm, and copy what appears. Discord shows a token once: when you leave the page, it is hidden for good. If you lose it, click Reset Token again; the old one stops working everywhere it was used, which is also what to do if it ever leaks. Keep it somewhere for a minute: the next page puts it in your project. Then forget where you kept it and delete it from there.
The token is the password of your bot. Never put it in your code, never commit it, never paste it in a chat or a screenshot. A project made with create chapterjs keeps it in a .env file that git ignores.

Copy the ID of your test server

Every server, channel, user and message on Discord has an ID: a number of 17 to 20 digits that never changes, even when the name does. Your project needs the ID of your test server, so that chapterjs dev knows where to run your bot. IDs are hidden until you turn on Developer Mode in Discord: User Settings → Advanced → Developer Mode. Then right-click your test server in the server list and choose Copy Server ID.
Discord calls a server a guild in its API. You will see the word in a few names (DEV_GUILD_ID, guild in your code): it always means a server.

Adding the bot to your test server

Nothing to do now. A bot is added to a server through a link that Discord generates from the application. chapterjs dev prints that link the first time it runs and the bot is not in the server yet, and waits for you to open it. You will see it on the next page.

The three privileged intents

Still on the Bot page, under Privileged Gateway Intents, there are three switches: Presence Intent, Server Members Intent and Message Content Intent. These are the privileged intents of the previous chapter: what a bot has to ask permission for, because it is more personal than the rest. Leave them off for now. ChapterJS tells you when one of your files needs one, with the name of the file and the link to this page, and waits for you to enable it. Enabling what you don’t use is the one thing to avoid: a bot in 100 servers or more has to be verified by Discord to keep its privileged intents, and the fewer it asks for, the easier that is.

Recap

  • Two applications: my-bot dev for your computer, my-bot for production.
  • The token of the dev bot, from Bot → Reset Token: shown once, a password.
  • The ID of your test server, with Developer Mode on: right-click → Copy Server ID.
  • The privileged intents stay off until a file of yours needs one.

Creating the project

Put the two values in a project and see the bot come online.

Guide: Your Discord application

The same steps, straight to the point, with every message of the CLI.