Discord Bot for Ladder Dogs

Simple discord bot which manages puzzle channels for puzzle hunts via discord commands, used by a small-to-medium sized team.

This was initially created from cookiecutter-discord.py-postgres and uses aiogoogle/gspread_asyncio for (optional) Google Drive integration. It uses gino to store puzzle metadata in a PostgreSQL database.

Thanks to a few other teams who have helped to improve on the bot's features. Credit especially to @AkbarTheGreat on Splat for adding the discord slash commands and PostgreSQL backend support.

Usage

Most users will just need to become familiar with two slash commands:

1. To post a new puzzle channel, post /puzzle puzzle-name in the #general channel of the corresponding puzzle round. This will create a new text and voice channel where puzzle discussion can take place, as well as a new Google Spreadsheet with a handy Quick Links worksheet. You can scroll the sidebar or use Ctrl + K to help search for existing puzzle channels.
2. When Hunt HQ has confirmed that the puzzle has been solved, post /solve SOLUTION in the puzzle channel. The channels will be automatically archived afterwards.

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To start a new hunt, start with

/hunt <hunt-url e.g. https://mysteryhunt.edu> <hunt-name>

For a new round/world of puzzles, first start by posting /round in the #<discord_bot_channel> channel (assuming there's only one active hunt), or in the #general channel associated with the hunt:

/round hunt-round-name

This will create a #hunt-round-name category along with a #general puzzle text and voice channel for the round. The #general channels are the place for general discussion about the round, but the name can be changed as a setting if desired. If the name is #meta, a sheet will also be created for tracking the meta puzzle. (If there is more than one meta, creating new puzzle channels would be prudent).

For a new puzzle, one can either post the puzzle via /puzzle in the #<discord_bot_channel> channel:

/puzzle <puzzle:puzzle-name> <hunt_round:round-name>

Or simply /puzzle puzzle-name in the corresponding round's #general channel. This will create a #puzzle-name text and voice channel where discussion of the puzzle can take place.

When the puzzle is solved, post /solve SOLUTION in the puzzle's channel. The text channel will automatically get archived (moved to the #solved-puzzles category) after ~5 minutes, and the voice channel will be deleted. If this is mistakenly entered, this can be undone by posting /unsolve.

There are various other commands for updating the status, type, priority, and notes associated with a puzzle. These fields are mainly for others to easily find out about the status of other puzzles. They can be retrieved on the discord channels using the corresponding commands (see /info for the available commands), or viewed in aggregate on the Nexus spreadsheet, where all puzzles and links are listed.

Admin

Users with the manage_channel role can update administrative settings via /update_setting {key} {value}, where all of the settings can be viewed via /show_settings. At the start of a hunt, an admin should create /hunt <hunt_url> <hunt_name> and then update the hunt settings /update_hunt_setting hunt_url https://hunt-website/puzzle/ to the base url where puzzles can be found. This hunt url will be used to guess the link to the puzzle when new puzzles are posted. If the generated puzzle link is wrong, it can be updated by posting /link https://correct-hunt-website-link in the puzzle channel.

There are also various links to Google Drive that should be updated prior to the start of hunt, like the IDs of the root Google Drive folder, Resources document, and Nexus spreadsheet. The ID is just the ~33 ASCII character ID string in the URL, not the full URL to the Google documents.

Google Drive

When a puzzle channel is created, if Google Drive integration is enabled, a corresponding spreadsheet is created in the a folder for the puzzle round in the root Google Drive directory. The spreadsheet will have a secondary "Quick Links" tab created for convenience.

The bot periodically updates a "nexus spreadsheet" which shows a list of all puzzles along with relevant information such as the puzzle url, spreadsheet link. (The formatting of the nexus spreadsheet can be done manually by the user; the bot only populates the contents of the spreadsheet cells.)

Setup with Docker Compose

I don't recommend using docker compose for production instances, I maintain my runs on Kubernetes by deploying a postgres container as a statefulset and the bot as a deployment on its own. But for testing local changes against a test bot, docker compose has been very useful.

Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/azjps/ladder_dogs_discord_bot

Create a discord application and bot. For discord bot gateway intents, navigate in the discord developer portal to {your app} > Bot > Privileged Gateway Intents, and toggle on MESSAGE CONTENT INTENT. (This might no longer be necessary as the bot now uses the slash commands API.) Add the bot's token to a config.json file in the root directory of this project:

{
  "discord_bot_token": "{{discord_bot_token}}",
  "prefix": "!",
  "database": "postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/postgres"
}

Create a .env file with relevant database information, such as:

DB_PORT=5432
DB_DATABASE=postgres
DB_USER=postgres
DB_PASSWORD=CHANGEME

(It would have been nice if gino supported sqlite for something more lightweight. It would not be too hard to switch to sqlalchemy if the need arises, especially given sqlalchemy natively supports asyncio now. Also its a bit unfortunate that there are multiple config files & secrets files required.)

For the Google Drive integration (optional -- comment out the gsheet cog if not desired), create a Google service account (for example see these instructions from gspread), and save the service account key JSON file as google_secrets.json.

Now you can run the bot by running the following in a shell: docker compose up. On a barebones VM, you may first have to install Docker & docker-compose:

sudo yum install docker -y
sudo systemctl start docker
# Check docker-compose website for relevant release
curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.23.3/docker-compose-linux-x86_64 -o bin/docker-compose
sudo ~/bin/docker-compose up

To launch a postgres cli shell to see the state of the database:

sudo docker ps
sudo docker exec -it ladder_dogs_discord_bot-db-1 psql -U postgres
# Dump contents of database to file
sudo docker exec -it ladder_dogs_discord_bot-db-1 pg_dump -U postgres > ~/pg_dump.$(date +'%Y%m%d').sql

To launch an interactive python shell with the same environment:

sudo docker-compose run bot sh
pipenv run python

If you're interested in running the latest released version somewhere and don't want to build it yourself, @AkbarTheGreat has a docker image on dockerhub for Splat's latest bot release, that can be retrieved with docker pull akbarthegreat/splat-storage-discord

Tests

(Currently not maintained.) Use pipenv install --dev to install dev packages, and in the repo root directory, run

python -m pytest

Formatting / linting is done with ruff.

Credits

Inspired by various open source discord bot python projects like cookiecutter-discord.py-postgres. Licensed under GPL 3.0 (due to the aforementioned cookiecutter).