introduction.markdown

Pylon SDK and TypeScript introduction

Hello there! Looks like you chose Pylon to program your own discord bot, easily deployable with no traps or hidden costs. You have made the right choice :3

This page will give you a first overview of Pylon SDK and TypeScript for absolute beginners so you can start experimenting.

First the basics:

• No code will work outside an async function (exceptions but I will come to that later)

• To save and publish a script you need to click on script and publish. If this action is not successfully made it deletes your last changes.

Async Functions

What are async functions?

async functions are the things you will use to make Pylon do something in response to either:

• a command

• an event

• a scheduled task

If you try to make Pylon do something outside of an async function it will throw an error (in most cases). There are ways to put code outside these three groups but I will come back to that later

Commands

You first need to define that you want a command:

const commands = new discord.command.CommandGroup({
  defaultPrefix: '!'
});

Great! You are all set to build your first command! You do so by using .raw() for a simple command, there are other options. Let's look at how your first command would look:

commands.raw('test', async (message) => {
  await message.reply(
    'Test complete! (This command does not actually do anything)'
  );
});

Let's break down what exactly we are doing there. '' means something is a string. A string is basically programmer language for normal text. What string you use at the start depends on what you want your command to be. This command is called by typing !test.

Next we use async(message)=>{. Remember when I said async function? Here you define it as async function, you will need to put this in every command, every other way of starting to make Pylon do something. In the () I wrote message. You can call this anything but I would call it a message to keep track. message is a discord message object. It is the message you send to invoke this command

Now we start with the actual code inside the command. First I used await, you can not use it in this case but it is not a good practice if you don't use it. We now use the message object we just defined in the code. We tell Pylon to reply to that message. This doesn't mean discord reply feature, only that Pylon sends a message in the same channel the command was used in. In the () you can now put what you want Pylon to send in response to the command you use. BUT REMEMBER, it must be a string because you want to send a text. To make the text a string use '' around it as established before

Now all we have to do is close all () and {}.

Note: Remember to always close them and to close a string after you started it with a '. If you don't know where to close what, look at what you opened first, this will be the thing you will want to close last. You mostly will use normal (), for now only worry about {} after the => of an async function

Events

There are a lot of differnt events you can make Pylon react to but the most common one is MESSAGE_CREATE. This means your code is triggered whenever a message is created in your server. Let's take a look at an easy script for that:

discord.on(discord.Event.MESSAGE_CREATE, async (message) => {
  if (message.content == 'Hello') {
    await message.reply('Hello!');
  }
});

Time to analyze what we do there: first, the method we use to look for events is discord.on. After the ( we define the event to look for. You can either tell Pylon that with a string e.g. 'MESSAGE_CREATE' or you use the cleaner (my opinion) way discord.Event.MESSAGE_CREATE. Now you see the similarity to the command, we again use async (message) => {.

Since we don't want Pylon to respond to every message we build in an if check.You will use if checks a lot in any programming language you come across. They work as follows:

if (something) {
  do another thing
}

In this case you check if the message content == (that means equals exactly) the string (text) 'Hello'. If that is the case we do what we did before with the command, let Pylon reply with 'Hello!'. REMEMBER that this is case sensitive, so Pylon won't trigger if you say 'hElLo'.

Tasks

With task you can schedule when Pylon does what, without a requirement like MESSAGE_CREATE having to be fulfilled to be activated. This is a Pylon SDK specific thing meaning nothing normal TypeScript can do. It also means you start it with pylon.. Here is an example of that:

pylon.tasks.cron('Hello', '0 0 0/30 * * * * *', async () => {
  let guild = await discord.getGuild()
  let channel = await guild.getTextChannel('765969331343327304')
  
  await channel?.sendMessage('When:tm:')
})

Let's break this down: first, we use something new, pylon.. Things that start with this are Pylon exclusive and you can't find them anywhere else. This schedules a Pylon cron task, meaning an event that is fired every x minutes/days/weeks/months, etc. You first define what the cron task's name is (It isn't actually important at all and doesn't impact what you're doing in any way). How you specify when a cron is gonna fire/in what interval:

Look at this

Then we are making it an async function again, this time nothing in the brackets because we have no object that activated the function like a message object or some other objects you will see further down the line. Then we define our guild object (=server) and with that object, we can get a channel object by putting its ID in the brackets. Having this we can use sendMessage on it sending the specified message to the specified channel. This happens every 30 minutes in this case.

Note: You can only have up to 5 cron tasks in your script. Consider putting multiple things in one cron if they should happen at the same interval. Additional Note: You can't make Pylon send messages in lower intervals than 5 minutes, check if you try to do that when your code does not work.

To be continued...