When it comes to IDE’s for development, I have usually stuck to PyCharm or Visual Studio. However, a few times throughout my OSU journey I have been instructed to test/play around with replit. I would do these exercises, but really did not comprehend the power of this technology. I want to share my experience with creating a discord bot on this site.
As I have mentioned multiple times on this blog, I am a huge fan of the NFL and more specifically the Vikings. Video games are also something I enjoy, so as you can imagine I love to play the madden football game. First, I feel like I need to give a little background. In Madden you can create an online franchise, where you and 31 other people take over a team and essentially become the GM. What I mean by this is that you negotiate contracts, sign free agents, draft rookies, etc. Not only do you get to do this, but you also get to play another person each week that is “controlling” the other team you play. As you can imagine sometimes all the teams are not filled and that is where my bot comes into play.
The bot I created uses a database (built-in on replit) to store a dictionary that knows what teams open and what teams are filled. The bot takes certain commands to fill or clear a team. Once the bot is in the Discord server it scans all the messages, and then if it sees during this process I used a built-in debugger as well with breakpoints, watches, etc. After everything was done you can hit run and it builds your own https address. However, the only caveat to replit is that once you kill the tab the site/bot will go down too. To mitigate this problem, you must use a free service called uptime robot to ping your site every 5 minutes or so.
Hope you guys learned a little bit about replit and my experience using it. It is not only good for python, it can be used to mimic a variety of environments from ruby to raku to c++. The youtube video that I followed along with to get the bot up and running is found here: Code a Discord Bot with Python – Host for Free in the Cloud – Bing video . Let me know what you think about replit!
