Heroku deployment guide

If you're looking for the local installation instructions, go here.

If you wanted to host ScheduleBot locally, you'd need to have your computer on 24/7 to have your bot always online. To avoid that, we could use a PaaS provider, such as Heroku. Heroku's free plan is good enough for hosting our bot.

Deployment instructions

To deploy ScheduleBot to Heroku, you will need:

• NodeJS 6 or above.
• git.

First, sign up to Heroku, and create an app. You may deploy your bot using the Heroku CLI, or GitHub. I recommend GitHub, as it's easier. If you choose Heroku CLI, follow the instructions there. If you choose GitHub, first fork this repository. Then, clone your fork and checkout the heroku branch, and install the dependencies:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your_github_username>/schedulebot.git
$ cd schedulebot
$ git checkout heroku
$ npm install

The heroku branch is ready to be compatible with Heroku. The differences from master are:

• The database settings are no longer stored in config.js, as they are provided by Heroku through an environment variable.
• The package.json file is modified to tell Heroku to use Node 6.
• A Procfile with your bot's process is included.

Now edit the bot's settings in config.js. You can edit or leave whatever you want, but you should at least edit:

• master_channel with the Discord channel where your bot will operate.
  • If you don't know how to get it, go to Discord's settings, then Appearance, then check Developer Mode. After that, right click on your channel, and click Copy ID.
• default_timezone with the time zone which will be used by the bot.

Next step is configuring your database. In your app's dashboard, go to Resources, and under Add-ons, click Find more add-ons. Then search Heroku Posgres and add it to your app. The free version is good enough for personal use.

After adding it, you'll find it under the Add-ons section. Click on it to your Heroku Postgres dashboard, and then click on your newly created Datastore. Scroll down to Database Credentials, and click View Credentials. Now run the setup script entering those credentials:

$ npm run setup

Follow the script's instructions. After you're done, you're ready to push your repo to GitHub:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Ready to deploy"
$ git push --all

Before deploying your bot, let's add your bot user to your Discord server. In order to do so, go to the Discord dev center and click on your application, then grab your Client ID. Then go to the following link in your browser:

https://discordapp.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&scope=bot&permissions=0x00002000

Replace YOUR_CLIENT_ID by your bot's client ID. Don't forget to grant the "Manage Messages" permission.

Now, in your Heroku dashboard, go to Deploy, select GitHub, connect your account, and add your fork. Be sure to select the heroku branch.

The first build should be triggered. When it's done, navigate to Resources, and, if everything went right, you should see two Dynos: web, and bot. Shutdown web, as we don't need it, and turn on bot. After that, your bot will be loaded. Go to the top right corner, under More, then View Logs to see the console log. If you see the message Running!, the bot is live. Congratulations!

Usage guide

After deploying your bot, you might want to check out the usage guide.