Skip to content
/ BotDocs Public

BotDocs is a simple and lightweight file-based, stateless command documentation software for your Discord bot — with advanced features such as extended command descriptions and custom static pages.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

Akke/BotDocs

Repository files navigation

Version GitHub Release MIT License

BotDocs — Document your Discord bot

BotDocs is a simple and lightweight file-based, stateless command documentation software for your Discord bot. One does in fact not fit all, and have therefore designed this project with a lot of configuration and customization options in mind, making sure you can tailor it to your taste. It's the best way to display all of your commands for your bot, and the necessary data that comes with it, in a sleek and elegant way.

Primary Features

  • Completely free to use and open source.
  • Display all of your bots commands, with their aliases, usage examples, argument parameters and much more.
  • Add more details to existing command descriptions by extending them with .md files.
  • Currently supports up to 8+ languages (and counting!)
  • Simple and clean design, with built-in support for customization through themes (comes with 3 themes by default: light, midnight and discord)
  • Enable, disable and extend several features of BotDocs with comprehensive configuration settings.
  • Create static pages, separate from commands, using .md files (useful for e.g. ToS and policy pages)

Want to suggest a new feature or feel like something needs an improvement? Don't be afraid to reach out to us — we're happy to hear your criticism.

Overview

Installation

  1. Download the latest release (https://github.com/Akke/BotDocs/releases/latest) from the releases page.
  2. Upload everything to your desired directory.
  3. Install all dependencies with npm i
  4. Create the file src/configs/commands.js NOTE: See below for detailed information about the commands configuration.
  5. Build BotDocs with npm run build (if you wish to run in developer mode without building, run npm run dev)
  6. Run BotDocs with npm run start
  7. (optional) See https://nextjs.org/docs/deployment for more deployment methods (e.g. Docker)

Setting up your commands

BotDocs presents the commands by reading from a configuration file in src/configs/commands.js and takes a very specific object structure (as seen below). If your structure doesn't look like this, it's recommended that you pre-parse it on your own to make sure it's suited for the application, or if you don't wish to use categories at all — create all command objects under just one category.

module.exports = {
    "Informative": [
        {
            "name": "help",
            "aliases": [
                "h"
            ],
            "description": "Gives a link to a website where you can find all the information you need.",
            "usage": "help",
            "params": [
                {
                    "name": "category",
                    "description": "Lock a command category to one channel",
                    "type": "string",
                    "required": true
                },
                {
                    "name": "channel",
                    "description": "Mention a channel with #channelname",
                    "type": "channel",
                    "default": "Takes the channel the command was ran in"
                }
            ],
            "permissions": {
                "logic": "OR",
                "levels": [
                    {
                        "type": "server",
                        "name": "MANAGE_CHANNELS"
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    ]
}

Categories

  • Informative (example) - Name of the category which its children are put into. All commands inside each category will appear grouped similarly on the website, you can name them however you like.

Properties

  • name (string)
  • aliases (array with strings)
  • description (string)
  • usage (string)
  • params (array with objects, see example above)
  • If a command requires a specific permission set: permissions (object, see example above)

If you're missing any property, you're likely to stumble upon multiple errors.

Configuration

The configuration that can be found in src/configs/app.js comes with many configuration options.

  • bot_prefix - The default prefix for your bot (this is to be displayed in usage examples of commands)

  • list_mode - The method of displaying the commands list (default, cards or compact)

    • Default: A regular list with permission set visible and description preview (does not render .md syntax)
    • Cards: Commands displayed in a card view instead of a long list.
    • Compact: A list with reduced paddings to preserve space, as well as redacted permissions and description preview, to only display the command name.
  • locale - The language all static text should be in, using ISO 639-1 language codes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes) Note: Locales must be added manually before building the application. See below for more information.

    • el (greek)
    • en (english) default
    • et (estonian)
    • fr (french)
    • jp (japanese)
    • nl (dutch)
    • sv (swedish)
    • tr (turkish)
  • locale_fallback - The language to fallback to in case a phrase is missing in the current active language (defaults to en)

  • enable_pages - Defaults to true and controls whether you want to enable custom pages. The menu link for custom pages will also disappear if set to false

  • menu_links - Custom link properties to replace the default static menu (icons will be disabled). To disable, leave the arrays empty.

    • "menu_links": {
            "default": [
                {
                    "name": "Custom Home Link",
                    "target": "/"
                }
            ],
            "custom_pages": [
                {
                    "name": "Terms of Service",
                    "target": "/page/tos"
                }
            ]
        }
  • logo_url - Public path to the url of your logo to display above the menu (e.g. /static/images/logos/mylogo.png)

  • category_colors - Custom color codes for your categories to add some variety to the design (leave empty to use the themes primary color instead).

    • "category_colors": {
           "moderation": "#F00"
       }
  • enable_footer_credits - Toggles the "Powered by BotDocs" GitHub link in the page footer.

Translations

Translations are supported if added manually before compiling the application. To do this, you must create a file in src/data/locales using an ISO 639-1 language code for the name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes).

{
    "categories": "Categories",
    "commands": "Commands",
    ...
}

Translate the text on the right and leave the keys and variables wrapped in {{}} tags alone. You must also modify src/utils/i18n.js and import the new language file.

import localeEN from "../data/locales/en.json";
import localeSV from "../data/locales/sv.json";
// new import here

const resources = {
    en: {
        translation: localeEN
    },
    sv: {
        translation: localeSV
    }
    // new language object here, using ISO 639-1 codes
};

Themes

You can change the color scheme and a lot of other properties of the design which is done in SASS. Locate the file src/styles/theme.sass and import the theme you wish to use, and comment out the inactive ones.

@import "themes/light"
//@import "themes/discord"
//@import "themes/midnight"

To edit an existing theme, find the theme inside the themes directory and edit the variables found within.

If you want to create a new theme, simply make a new file in src/styles/themes/your-new-file.sass and copy/paste the variables from an existing theme file.

Custom Pages

You can also use BotDocs to serve regular, static pages, which you can disable in the configuration (enabled by default). Simply create file inside the src/data/pages directory with the .md suffix (markdown).

Files within the directory will create new URL handles depending on the file name and its subdirectories. For example, if you create src/data/pages/helloworld.md it will be served at yoursite.com/page/helloworld, and if you create src/data/pages/my/extended/path/helloworld.md it will be available at yoursite.com/page/my/extended/path/helloworld.

Extending Commands

Just like you can create custom pages, you can also extend command descriptions using a similar method, with .md files and syntax.

If you have a category called moderation and a command named ban, you can then create the file src/data/commands/moderation/ban.md and everything inside this file will replace the default description property in the commands file.

You can use this method if you wish to explain into further detail how a command works, or if you wish to include images, links, and so on.

Need help?

There is no official place to ask for help as of yet, but you can either open an issue in this repo or send me a friend request on discord at Axwell#0538 and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

About

BotDocs is a simple and lightweight file-based, stateless command documentation software for your Discord bot — with advanced features such as extended command descriptions and custom static pages.

Topics

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

No packages published

Contributors 3

  •  
  •  
  •