Pythia

Pythia is a Discord bot written in Rust to add functionality to our Discord server while providing a way to learn Rust.

It is named after Pythia, who was the Oracle of Delphi. It aims to provide functionality such as poll creation, meeting minute recording, agenda management and resource cataloguing.

Usage

Pythia uses the ! command prefix and will not respond to any other messages.

usage: !<command> [<args>]

Pythia can perform many tasks to assist project management in a Discord server:

• Manage the agenda of a future meeting:

   !agenda add <item>    add an <item> to the current agenda
   !agenda show          send the agenda in the 'meetings' channel
   !agenda export        export the agenda as a markdown file
   !agenda clear         clear the agenda
  

• Collate meeting minutes for a given day:

   !minutes <date>       export the messages sent in the 'meetings' channel on
                         the date <date> (D/M/Y) as a formatted markdown file
  

• Create a poll message:

   !poll <title> <args>  creates a poll message with title <title> and options
                         <args>, up to a maximum of 10 arguments
  

• Record a useful resource for future reference:

   !resource <item>      records the <item> in the 'resources' channel to make
                         sure it doesn't get lost in discussion
  

This information can also be retrieved by sending the !help command to Pythia.

Development

The bot can be built by cloning the repository and building it using cargo build, which will install all the required dependencies.

It expects the Discord token to be found in a file called token.env, which should be in the root directory of the project. This should contain a single line in the form token=<token>.

Discord Setup

Tokens can be generated on the Discord website using the following instructions:

• Open the Discord Developer Portal
• Create a new application using a name such as Pythia
• Navigate to the Bot tab and add a bot, giving it a username
• Copy the token under the username into the token.env file

Now that the bot exists, you can add it to a server to begin testing it. The easiest way to do this is to create a private server for you and the bot before you let it loose publicly.

• Navigate to the OAuth2 tab
• Under Scopes, check the bot tickbox
• Enable the relevant permissions under Bot Permissions
  • Currently this is just Send Messages, Add Reactions and Attach Files
• Open the resulting URL to choose the server to add it to

After these steps, you should be able to run the bot and send a message such as !poll Title Option1 Option2 in the server, with the bot responding with a formatted poll and reacting with options.