Run Botler¶

There are two main different ways to run Botler: in a Docker container or natively using Yarn. For production running everything in Docker and for development only running the database in Docker is recommended.

Using Yarn¶

Install all dependencies:
```
yarn install
```
Build the Prisma client:
```
yarn prisma generate
```
Note

This needs to be done each time you change a .prisma file. See the Prisma page for the reason why.
Compile the project from TypeScript to JavaScript:
```
yarn run build:dev
# Or if the compiler should also watch for changes
yarn run build:watch
```
Now there should be a dist folder in the root with the compiled code.
Configure Botler to your liking. See the Configuration page for more information.
Start the database (See how to in docker) and apply all migrations.
Finally, run the following command to start it:
```
yarn run start:dev
```
Note

The start:dev command supports debuggers like VSCode's Node debugger.

Using Docker¶

The bot and the database can be entirely run inside Docker using Docker Compose in development and production environments.

The .env file

The docker-compose command automatically consumes .env files in its working directory. Depending on its content it could accidentally set DATABASE_HOST to not point at the database container.

Configuration and migrations

This section expects the database to already have all migrations applied and the bot to be configured properly.

Yarn usage

The examples here all use yarn [script name] to make the commands shorter and easier to use/remember. If you want to use the docker-compose command directly, check the scripts property in package.json to see the contents of those scripts.

Development¶

This configuration does not try to be as small as possible and runs the bot in development mode, allowing a debugger to connect to the node process and keeping useful tools in the image. Still, the database restarts unless manually stopped.

Start the development config by running the following command in the project root:

yarn docker:dev up --detach --build

This command script calls docker-compose with the correct compose files which set the PostgreSQL password to botler by default.

Parameter Meanings

--detach will run the containers in the background and is optional. To inspect them use Docker Desktop or the Docker CLI.
--build will make docker-compose build the bot image even if it was previously built. This is needed for applying changes since the last build.

Production¶

The production configuration is designed to only contain the things required to run the bot. It first builds the bot in the same environment as the development configuration but then copies the final build into the mhart/alpine-node:slim image and starts the bot in production mode. Additionally, the bot like the database always restarts unless manually stopped.

The command for the production configuration is just like the development command but needs some environment variables manually provided (Check out the Docker Compose Docs to see how) and has a different script name.

yarn docker:prod up --detach --build

Using Docker only for the database¶

If you want to just run the database in Docker there are some commands provided to only managing the db service:

# Start the database
yarn db:start

# Start the database and detach it from the command
yarn db:deploy

# Stop the database
yarn db:stop

# Stop the database and delete all data
yarn db:reset

All those commands use the development configuration and are configurable via the same environment variables.

Last update: August 2, 2021