discord.py project 3: Random Dog Pics! 🐕

In this article, you're going to learn how to make a Discord bot that can:

• Send a picture of a dog in an embed
• Send a dog fact in an embed using footers

By the end of this post, you will know how to:

• Make REST API requests
• Parse JSON data
• Use the footer and image fields of an embed.

Wherever the command is used, it will send an embed similar to this:

To start, we need to initialize our bot. This time, we're back using commands.Bot since we are going to have one function, our dog command.

import discord
from discord.ext import commands

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

client.run('token')

So far, we have a bot with the prefix !. When it's ready, it will print Ready in the console!

---

Let's make the dog command now! Let's start by importing the modules we will need: aiohttp and json.

Note: type pip install aiohttp before running the code! ```py import discord from discord.ext import commands import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event async def on_ready(): print("Ready")

client.run('token')

Now create the command:
```py
import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog')
      dogjson = await request.json()

client.run('token')

Now, dogjson will be a variable containing a dictionary, which is a list of aliases.

{% details What's a dictionary? %} An example of where you would use a dictionary is in a substitution cipher. You might be making an a1z26 (where a becomes 1, b becomes 2, etc.). So, you'd make a dictionary to make it easier:

azdict = {'a':'1', 'b':'2', 'c':'3'}

Now, you could use this to substitute:

my_string = "abc abc"
for index, letter in enumerate(my_string): # Iterate through each letter
   if letter in azdict.keys(): # iterate through the key and not the value (e.g. a, b, c, and so on)
      my_string[index] = azdict[letter]
print(my_string)

>> '123 123'

---

{% enddetails %}

Knowing that the dictionary is structured like this: we know that we want to use the link key.

Now, we can

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
import aiohttp

client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!")

@client.event
async def on_ready():
   print("Ready")

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog') # Make a request
      dogjson = await request.json() # Convert it to a JSON dictionary
   embed = discord.Embed(title="Doggo!", color=discord.Color.purple()) # Create embed
   embed.set_image(url=dogjson['link']) # Set the embed image to the value of the 'link' key
   await ctx.send(embed=embed) # Send the embed

client.run('token')

Now, when we use the bot command, we will get this output:

---

Now, let's have it send a dog fact as well! SomeRandomAPI also has a dog facts endpoint, which will allow us to get a random fact about dogs!

@client.command()
async def dog(ctx):
   async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
      request = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/img/dog')
      dogjson = await request.json()
      # This time we'll get the fact request as well!
      request2 = await session.get('https://some-random-api.ml/facts/dog')
      factjson = await request2.json()

   embed = discord.Embed(title="Doggo!", color=discord.Color.purple())
   embed.set_image(url=dogjson['link'])
   embed.set_footer(text=factjson['fact'])
   await ctx.send(embed=embed)

This will produce the following!

---

Have Questions? Have a suggestion about what to do for the next post?

Tell me in the comments and I'll reply!