Features ​

DiscordBox aims to keep things simple and easy to use. It leverages on the power of discord.js which is already a great library to interact with the Discord API. It handles most boilerplate code and generic configuration that is mandatory before even starting to implement any logic that is specific to what you want to achieve.

Slash commands deployment ​

If your goal is to create a Discord bot that uses Slash commands, deploying them through Discord's API is mandatory. As it's easy to mess up, DiscordBox automatically handles this for you as long as you register them properly as shown in the Run a simple bot example.

Regarding this topic, it is quite bothersome to wait for Slash commands to be deployed globally when you're developing your bot as it can take up to several hours to be available. To mitigate this, DiscordBox deploys them on a specific guild that you are highly recommanded to configure when NODE_ENV environment variable is set to development.

Deeper interaction system ​

Based on how discord.js recommend to handle interactions, DiscordBox adds a layer of abstraction that also allows you to pass extra data to your interaction's callback or trigger other interaction handlers programmatically in some cases.

All of this is possible thanks to a specific way of dealing with Message Components customId property.

Here is how we craft it by default:

const customId = `uniqueId:action:previousRequestId:extraData`;

const customId = `uniqueId:action:previousRequestId:extraData`;

As you can see it is composed of four parts separated by a :. If we break it down, here is what each part means:

• uniqueId: A unique identifier for that particular element.
• action: The action name that should be triggered when the element is interacted with. It must refer to a registered interaction handler.
• previousRequestId: By default, when an interaction is received by your bot, DiscordBox generate some interaction metadata, a unique request ID being one of them. In this case, this refers to the request ID of the interaction that made the current one possible.

• extraData: Any extra information you want to dynamically pass to the interaction handler's callback. We recommend it to be a short string that could be a key in a cache for example.

Only uniqueId and action are mandatory. The other two are optional and can be omitted if you don't need them. You must keep the : separator though.

Here is an example:

const customId = `66ab3a868d839d62:ping::`;

const customId = `66ab3a868d839d62:ping::`;

Improved developer experience ​

As time goes by, more and more methods are added to this framework to enhance developer experience. Here are some examples:

• Send a direct message to a particular user
• Delete a specific message
• Generate cryptographically secure random strings
• Transform a given string into a Markdown code block with syntax highlighting