A tutorial on creating a simple discord bots for announcements.

How it will work

Our bot will work in the following steps:

1. Take announcement command e.g. !announce <announcement here>
2. Check if user has announcer role
3. Post announcement through Discord webhook

Setting up

First, enter a blank folder an set it up with npm init. Then, install discord.js with npm i discord.js --save. Then, head towards the Discord Developer Portal and create a new application. You can name it whatever you want, but you should probably name it something like Announcement Bot. Then, open the bot page and click create a bot. Inside your development folder create a file named config.json, and in it write this:

{
  "token":"put your discord token here",
  "announcer-role": "announcer role Id",
  "webhookToken": "webhook token",
  "webhookID": "webhook ID"
}

Fill in the Discord bot token in the token field.
You can invite your bot to a test server with the link: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=APPID&scope=bot, but fill in the APPID with the ID of your Discord application.
In your server, create a role called Announcer and copy the role ID. You can get the ID if you turn on developer mode in the Appearance section of Discord's settings. Fill in the announcer-role field of config.json. Also, create a channel for announcements and create a webhook for that channel. Fill in the webhook fields accordingly.

Now lets get started with the programming!

Coding the bot

Create a file named index.js and fill in the following code:

const Discord = require("discord.js");
const config = require("./config.json");

const client = new Discord.Client();
const webhookClient = new Discord.WebhookClient(config.webhookID, config.webhookToken);

client.once("ready", () => {
  console.log("Ready for action!");
});

client.on("message", (message) => {
  if (!message.member.roles.cache.has(config["announcer-role"]) || !message.content.startsWith("!") || message.author.bot) return;

  const args = message.content.slice(1).trim().split(' ');
  const command = args.shift().toLowerCase();

  if (command == "announce") {
    var announcement = "";
    for (const word in args) {
      announcement = announcement + args[word] + " ";
    }
    webhookClient.send(announcement)
  }
})

client.login(config.token);

Next Steps

So you have done it! You have successfully made a Discord announcement bot!

A couple things you could do:

• This bot is built to work with only one server. Try customizing it so it could work on multiple servers
• Allow customization of prefix in the config.json file
• Currently, the bot is just repeating whatever someone says with the command, which isn't that useful. Try getting it to send announcements in a better format

The source code for this tutorial is uploaded on Github