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Creating a Discord Application

Learn how to create a Discord application, add a bot to that application, and invite that bot to a server.

Create a Discord Application#

Before writing any code, we need to tell Discord that our bot exists. We do this by creating an "application" in the Discord Developer Portal.

  1. Go to the developer portal and login
  2. Click "New Application"
  3. Enter a name (select "Personal" for team unless you're using Teams)
  4. Add a bot to the new application by going to the "Bot" settings on the left and clicking "Add Bot"

Congrats! You now have a bot account that you can invite to servers and login to with Discord4J.

Adding the bot to servers#

Just like normal users, bots can't interact with a server unless they have joined it. Unlike normal users, a bot can't join a server on its own. Instead, it has to be added to the server by someone with permissions to do so.

This is done with an invite link that looks like this:

https://discord.com/api/oauth2/authorize?client_id=868739980447608892&scope=bot

To invite your newly-created bot, replace the value after client_id= with the client ID from the "OAuth2" settings page of the developer portal. Then, visit the link in a browser and select the server you want to add the bot to.

The bot should now show up in the member list of the server you selected!