catnip
A Discord API wrapper in Java. Fully async / reactive, built on top of
vert.x. catnip tries to map roughly 1:1 to how the Discord
API works, both in terms of events and REST methods available.
catnip is part of the amyware Discord server
Licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.
Installation
Current version:
Can I just download a JAR directly?
No. Use a real build tool like Maven or Gradle.
Javadocs?
Features
- Automatic sharding
- Very customizable - you can write extensions
for the library, as well as options
for most anything you could want to change. SeeEXTENSIONS.md
for more. - Modular - REST / shards can be used independently. See
MODULAR_USAGE.md
for more. - Customizable caching - Can run with no cache,
partial caching,
or write your own cache handler.
SeeCACHING.md
for more. - Asynchronous cache accesses.
- You can disable individual events.
- You can disable all events, and handle gateway events directly.
- Customizable ratelimit/session data handling - wanna store your
sessions/seqnums
and REST ratelimit data
in Redis, but gateway ratelimits
in memory? You can do that! - Customizable shard management
Basic usage
This is the simplest possible bot you can make right now:
final Catnip catnip = Catnip.catnip("your token goes here");
catnip.on(DiscordEvent.MESSAGE_CREATE, msg -> {
if(msg.content().startsWith("!ping")) {
msg.channel().sendMessage("pong!");
}
});
catnip.connect();
catnip returns CompletionStage
s from all REST methods. For example,
editing your ping message to include time it took to create the
message:
final Catnip catnip = Catnip.catnip("your token goes here");
catnip.on(DiscordEvent.MESSAGE_CREATE, msg -> {
if(msg.content().equalsIgnoreCase("!ping")) {
final long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
msg.channel().sendMessage("pong!")
.thenAccept(ping -> {
final long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
ping.edit("pong! (took " + (end - start) + "ms)");
});
}
});
catnip.connect();
You can also create a catnip instance asynchronously:
Catnip.catnipAsync("your token here").thenAccept(catnip -> {
catnip.on(DiscordEvent.MESSAGE_CREATE, msg -> {
if(msg.content().startsWith("!ping")) {
msg.channel().sendMessage("pong!");
}
});
catnip.connect();
});
Also check out the examples for Kotlin and Scala usage.
Modular usage
catnip supports being used in REST-only or shards-only configurations. The nice thing about catnip
is that using it like this is exactly the same as using it normally. The only difference is
that to use catnip in REST-only mode, you don't call catnip.connect()
and use
catnip.rest().whatever()
instead.
Custom event bus events
Because vert.x is intended to be used in clustered mode as well as in a single-node configuration,
emitting events over the built-in event bus requires registering a codec for the events that you
want to fire. If you have an event class MyEvent
, you can just do something to the effect of
eventBus().registerDefaultCodec(MyEvent.class, new JsonPojoCodec<>(this, MyEvent.class));
where JsonPojoCodec
is com.mewna.catnip.util.JsonPojoCodec
and is safe to use.
Useful extensions
catnip-voice
- Voice support for your catnip bot.
https://github.com/natanbc/catnip-voicecatnip-utilities
- Some extensions for typesafe commands, event waiters, reaction menus,
and more. https://github.com/queer/catnip-utilitiesdiscordbotlist-stats-catnip
- Wrapper aiming at combining all Discord Bot Lists AND Wrappers into one artifact.
Automatically handles pushing bot stats to bot lists. https://github.com/burdoto/discordbotlist-stats#using-with-catnip--
Why write a fourth Java lib?
- JDA is very nice, but doesn't allow for as much freedom with customizing the internals;
it's more / less "do it this way or use another lib" in my experience. - I didn't want ten billion events for every possible case. catnip maps more/less 1:1 with the
Discord API, and any "extra" events on top of that need to be user-provided via extensions or
other means. I guess really I just didn't want my lib to be as "high-level" as other libs are. - I wanted to try to maximize extensibility / customizability, beyond just making it modular. Things
like being able to intercept raw websocket messages (as JSON), write custom distributed cache handlers,
... are incredibly useful. - I like everything returning
CompletionStage
s instead of custom classes. I do get why other libs
have them, I just wanted to not. - I wanted modular usage to be exactly the same more / less no matter what; everything
should be doable through the catnip instance that you create. - I wanted to make a lib built on vert.x.
- To take over the world and convert all Java bots. :^)
Why vert.x?
- vert.x is nice and reactive and async. :tm:
- You can use callbacks or Rx (like we do), but vert.x also provides support for reactive streams
and kotlin coroutines. - There's a lot of vert.x libraries and documentation for just about
anything you want. - The reactive, event-loop-driven model fits well for a Discord bot use-case.