Apollo

Apollo is a Discord bot for the University of Warwick Computing Society. It is designed to augment our Discord server with a few of the user services available on our website.

Installation

Dependencies

Apollo uses pipenv for dependency and venv management. Install it with pip install pipenv, and then run pipenv install to install all the required dependencies into a new virtual environment.

Development Setup

1. pipenv install, as above
2. Copy config.example.yaml to config.yaml and configure the fields.
3. Copy alembic.example.ini to alembic.ini and configure any fields you wish to change.
4. Set up the database by running migrations with alembic upgrade head.
   • The default database location is postgresql+psycopg://apollo:apollo@localhost/apollo (in config.example.yaml) This requires PostgreSQL to be installed, with a database called apollo and a user with name and password apollo with access to it.
   • For testing purposes, you may wish to change it to a locally stored file such as sqlite:///apollo.sqlite3.
   • Alternatively, see the instructions below for using Docker.
5. On the Discord Developer Portal, make sure that your bot has the required intents.
   • Currently, the Messages and Members intents are necessary.

Run Apollo using pipenv run python apollo.py

Using Docker

A Dockerfile and docker-compose are provided for easily running Apollo. Assuming you already have docker installed, run docker compose up to start both Apollo and a postgres database.

The compose file uses a read-only bind mount to mount config.yaml into the container at runtime, not at build time. Copy config.example.yaml to config.yaml and configure the fields so that compose can do this. You will need to change the database url to postgresql+psycopg://apollo:apollo@db/apollo if you wish to connect to the containerised database. Be sure to configure the rest of the fields too: you need a discord bot token.

The docker image builds alembic.ini into it by copying the example, as it is rare any values in this wish to be changed on a per-deployment basis.

When you first create the database container, you'll need to apply migrations:

1. Run docker compose up -d to start both services in the background. The python one won't work, but leave it running.
   • When changing any source files, the container will have to be rebuilt: docker compose up --build
   • For containers running in the background, you can get the outputs using docker compose logs
2. Run docker compose exec apollo alembic upgrade head to apply the database migrations.
3. Run docker compose down && docker compose up to restart both services with the migrations applied.
   • Apollo will now be running in the foreground

Migrations will need to be re-applied every time the database schema changes.

Contributing

Check our issues for ideas of what to contribute. If you want to see a particular feature that isn't mentioned, feel free to work on it (but please do make an issue beforehand, so we can discuss it)

See our wiki for a general overview of the project and and Contributor Notes for project specific advice and utility.