Live Updates

Working on a bot can become troublesome when attempting to implement a new feature or when working on a new command that entails many changes. Some commands may also be refactors of pre-existing ones which will make the deployed bot go a little crazy.

The best way that I've found to working on my bot while currently running is to run two separate instances of the bot. I have the live bot running on a Raspberry Pi with up to date Python and Git installed (which was a bit of a challenge to work around).

In the past I've had a separate line that was commented out during my commits for the bot until I needed to develop it using a different prefix. This worked for a while but was a bit tiresome to keep switching the comment on and off. Sometimes forgetting entirely and pushing the uncommented line up to the live code. This called for a git --amend --no-edit commit which was again another step out of the way.

The Git fix

As of Git version 2.22, calling git branch --show-current would output the current name of the checked out branch. With a few lines, that name can be placed in a file and checked during each command to tell the bot what prefix to use.

For my use I placed this in a generic Functions.py file and import the function for when I call on the Client().

import nextcord
import json
import os

client = nextcord.Client()

def getPrefix(client, message):
  try:
    os.system("git branch --show-current > ./references/git-current-branch")
    with open("./reference/git-current-branch", "r") as currentBranch: 
      repo = currentBranch.read()
  finally: 
    # If on development branch or
    # If not main branch whichever is easier
    if repo == "development\n":
      return "."    # Prefix to separate from live code
    # Return the prefix for whichever server called the command
    else:
      with open('prefixes.json', 'r') as f:
        prefixes = json.load(f)
      return prefixes[str(message.guild.id)]

The os.system is a neat way of having the bot pass commands directly to the command line, in this case to show the current git branch name.

NOTE:

When using the '>' this will mean to overwrite the data in that file which is what we want.

Using '>>' instead will append to the existing file and cause a lot of clutter and won't be usable without the use of writing another function to trim it out.

This will be just another tool to help aid with development of a live bot without disruption and prevent errors like sending the wrong prefix like I had done a few too many times.