Frequently Asked Questions#

Got a question about our library? Well, your answer is probably laying somewhere around here.

Note

This page is maintained by the Helpers of the Discord server, and developers at their discretion. For any comments, feedback or concerns, please consider joining our Discord Server and bringing it up in our support channels.

The current state of discord.py and its further development is unclear. What about your library?#

We have no plans on stopping development and will be available for you. If you have any questions about the internal development, feel free to ask in the Discord support server.

Are you going to/will/consider fork(ing) discord.py?#

The short answer is: no.

The long answer is a list of numerous reasons as to why this decision was made:

  • There are/will be numerous forks out there for discord.py, and because of that, we cannot safely guarantee our ability to help users out who may be using their own form of modified code.

  • The original purpose of this library was to act as an extension of discord.py, but due to the issue of constantly having to monkeypatch solutions into their codebase to keep our library working introduced extreme technical debt. Forking discord.py and building off of it does not change anything from our issue of avoiding this.

  • The goal of this library is to solely implement support and integrate the use of interactions from the Discord API. Making this library unique in a sense that we only do this seemed reasonable and within our margin of standards at the time.

  • The message intent will inevitably be forced as a privileged intent in April 2022. The practicality of trying to support message commands will be infeasible since Discord Developers have already admitted that “not wanting to implement application commands” will not be a valid reason for applying for this privileged intent.

  • Forking discord.py would be a massive change to our current codebase, throwing away all of the effort we’ve put into it so far, and basically just be rewriting how v2.0a was created. That would make it nothing more than discord.py-interactions at that point – plus, we’re already a library that keeps very similar naming conventions as discord.py does, so this is pointless.

Will discord.py be able to work with this library?#

The short answer is: yes.

Attention

Even if it is working, we strongly advise against using d.py with our library.

Additionally, we will not give help for any issue resulting from using d.py with our library except of “Do not use discord.py”.

However, the term “work” is loosely structured here. Imagine it like taping a hole in the wall instead of repairing the wall. We’re essentially “plastering” support for discord.py instead of doing the surgery on its internal organs to make it work well with our library. As it currently stands, interactions.py and discord.py are API wrappers. You will be able to run code alongside one another, and you will be able to plug in some classes, but the data conversion must be exact.

What does that mean? Well, we’ll show you:

import interactions
from discord.ext import commands

client = interactions.Client(token="...")
dpy = commands.Bot(prefix="/")

@dpy.command()
async def hello(ctx):
    await ctx.send("Hello from discord.py!")

@client.command(
    name="test",
    description="this is just a testing command."
)
async def test(ctx):
    await ctx.send("Hello from discord-interactions!")

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

task2 = loop.create_task(dpy.start(token="...", bot=True))
task1 = loop.create_task(client.ready())

gathered = asyncio.gather(task1, task2, loop=loop)
loop.run_until_complete(gathered)

Both of these variables interactions and dpy will be able to run in the same established environment, and additionally will both function properly as their respective libraries intend them to. This implementation uses asyncio.gather to execute both starts simultaneously as asyncio tasks, and runs them under one singular loop.

Compared to traditional startup commands, interactions.ready() and dpy.start() is used instead of the typical interactions.start() and dpy.run() methods because of synchronous/async functions. asyncio.gather() works with coroutines, hence the transition.

What about the models, though? That’s a simple answer:

import discord
import interactions

@dpy.command()
async def borrowing(ctx, member: interactions.Member):
    await ctx.send(f"Member ID: {member.id}")

@client.command(...)
async def second_borrowing(ctx, member: discord.Member):
    await ctx.send(f"Member ID: {member.id}")

Both of these will be able to both run and give their proper value. It is very important to note here, though, that you must be returning back the exact same information that our objects depend on. A missing class instance can easily lead to it breaking, hence the “plastering” that is going on here.

Where should we go with discord.py being gone?#

The most biased answer would be to, of course, use interactions.py. We already offer a lot of the integral API wrapper aspects as discord.py does, however, we only specialize in interactions. Which means things such as these won’t be supported by our core library itself (but might be available as Extension Libraries):

  • Cooldowns

  • Message commands

  • Voice clients

There are other libraries of course though. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re looking to do mainly slash commands and that tidbit then we highly recommend using our library, especially as discord-components merges as of version 4.0. But if you want something way more open and versatile, then we recommend these sources:

  • Pycord (the most actively maintained).

  • NAFF (high level, “hackable” API wrapper with ease of modification).

  • nextcord (more abstract and fast approach to the Discord API).

It’s personally recommended from the library developer to seek these paths instead of sticking to an older version of a library, e.g. discord.py 1.7.3 or 2.0.0a as they can eventually become deprecated with more pending changes to the API by Discord engineers.

Why are you not supporting cooldowns?#

Cooldowns aren’t really an actual feature of the Discord API itself, but rather more of a convenient feature implemented in discord.py in order to avoid spamming of commands.

What if people spam slash/sub commands?

That’s the neat part: it’s really hard to do that, and most of the time, they won’t. Unless they copy the exact string that was used when you open up the UI element to do it numerous times, most users do and will not be able to know how to do this. However, if you as a bot developer feel at unease about this, you are more than welcome to implement your own cooldown methods yourself. Cooldowns were an ultimatum that came as the result of message commands being able to be spam-able, and since we won’t be supporting them, there’s no feasibility to having them in our library.

Will we not be able to create message commands?#

This is a tricky question to really answer. If you want the technical answer: you can definitely create them with our library, however, you’ll have to program them in the on_message_create listener event that we use. This is already something a majority of discord.py bot developers frown upon doing, so this is at your own risk to code your own command handlers into it. Luckily, you can take a page out of discord.js’ book if you want to do this, since they’ve never heard of an external command handler framework before in their entire life.

Extension Libraries#

A list of all official extensions can be found on our github page

Those are (at the moment):

  • voice client - which is still WIP, but it is able to listen for the VOICE_STATE_UPDATE event.

  • autosharder for automatic sharding

  • wait_for allows listening and waiting for a specific event or a component inside a function

  • files for file sending with ctx

  • Molter for message commands

  • enhanced which enhances the DX in general

  • paginator for paginating embeds on messages using components

  • persistence for storing data inside your custom IDs (as an alternative to wait_for)

  • lavalink for voice sending and listening VOICE_STATE_UPDATE event

  • fastapi for building own API

  • And a boilerplate

Below are a few unofficial exts (for the time being) which implement some functionality similar to what d.py had:

Usage examples can usually be found at the linked page

Can I make an Extension Library myself?#

Yeah, you can! We have a special channel reserved for the development of external libraries! You can also read this for more information.

I’m getting “AttributeError: HTTPClient not found!” when I try to execute helper methods!#

Probably you are doing something like this:

channel = interactions.Channel(**await bot.http.get_channel(channel_id))
await channel.send("...")

And the error occurs in the line where you try to send something. You can fix this easy by adding one argument:

channel = interactions.Channel(**await bot.http.get_channel(channel_id), _client=bot._http)
await channel.send("...")

You have to add this extra argument for every object you instantiate by yourself if you want to use it’s methods

Context and Messages don’t have the Channel and Guild attributes! Why?#

At the moment the Discord API does not include them into their responses. You can get those object via the get_channel() and get_guild() methods of the Context and Message model.

ctx.send got an unexpected keyword argument: files”! Why?#

It is not supported due to an decision of the core developer team. There are two ways to do it:

  • Using await channel.send instead

  • Using the files extension

ctx.send got an unexpected keyword argument: embed”! Why?#

This is quite simple: The argument embed got deprecated by Discord. The new naming is embeds.

How can I check what exception happened during a request?#

We, unlike d.py, do not offer something like interactions.NotFound.

Instead you have to do it like this:

Warning

This feature will be implemented with version 4.3 and is currently only available on beta/unstable

You can additionally get the exact reason for why the exception occurred with e.message or e.lookup(e.code)

My message content is always empty! How can I fix this?#

This happens because you did not enable the intent for message content. Enable it on the developer portal and add it into the Client definition as the following: bot = interactions.Client(..., intents=interactions.Intents.DEFAULT | interactions.Intents.GUILD_MESSAGE_CONTENT) You do not have to use Intents.DEFAULT, it can be any other intent(s) you need!

Is there something like Cogs?#

Yes! Although, we call them Extensions. Yeah, like Extension Libraries. This is because an extension Library is basically the same thing as a downloadable “cog”. This is how you create an extension for yourself:

# This is main.py
client = interactions.Client(...)
client.load("your.cog")

...

client.start()

# This is `/your/cog.py`

class TestCommand(interactions.Extension):
  def __init__(self, client):
    self.client: interactions.Client = client

  @interactions.extension_command(...)
  async def test_command(self, ctx, ...):
    ...

def setup(client):
  TestCommand(client)

It’s nothing more than that.

Since @bot.X decorators don’t work in extensions, you have to use these:

  • For event listeners, use @interactions.extension_listener

  • For component listeners, use @interactions.extension_component

  • For modal listeners, use @interactions.extension_modal

  • For autocomplete listeners, use @interactions.extension_autocomplete

channel.members does not exist, how do I get the people in a voice channel?#

channel.members actually does exist, but is reserved for threads. There is no attribute for people in a voice channel by the API. The only possible thing is to install the voice client extension and listen for the VOICE_STATE_UPDATE event and then having a local cache that gets updated when a member joins or leaves.

My question is not answered on here!#

Please join our Discord Server for any further support regarding our library and/or any integration code depending on it.