Moving On From Discord.py

I run a ~4k member Discord server that helps people who want to learn to code. Being on Discord we see a lot of people who are asking how to make their own Discord bots. Recently the maintainer for the most popular Python Discord API client has stepped away and archived the project. This has understandably led a lot of people to ask us what API clients we think are best. So I’m gonna give a quick look at a couple of the options I’ve seen pop up.

What Options Are There?

Thankfully in the wake of Discord.py going away a bunch of people have stepped forward to maintain their own forks of the project. So I’m gonna quickly cover two of the better ones I’ve found:

• nextcord
• pycord

nextcord

nextcord is a recent fork of Discord.py. It merged some of the alpha changes that were in the project to add support for buttons, drop downs, and threads. As of writing this they had not yet implemented slash commands, however everything is there, just need to add the necessary logic to tie it all together.

This project also renames the package, so when importing it’ll be nextcord not discord.

Features

• Commands (using the same implementation as Discord.py)
• Extensions (the same cog implementation as Discord.py)
• Threads
• Buttons/drop downs
• Near perfect compatibility with bots written for Discord.py

Issues

• Since the package is renamed it is necessary to update all of your code with the new import
• No slash commands (yet)
• Datetimes have been made timezone aware, this breaks some code using datetimes on any Discord object.

pycord

pycord is another recent fork of Discord.py. It also merged the alpha changes from Discord.py adding support for buttons, drop downs, and threads. Additionally they have begun implementing their own bot class that adds support for slash commands.

This project kept the discord package name, so migrating is simpler but it is necessary to uninstall Discord.py to avoid conflicts. This has the added benefit of maintaining support for any packages built for Discord.py.

Features

• Commands (using the same implementation as Discord.py)
• Extensions (the same cog implementation as Discord.py)
• Threads
• Buttons/drop downs
• Near perfect compatibility with bots written for Discord.py
• Mostly compatible with existing packages designed to be used with Discord.py

Issues

• Since the package shares the discord name with the Discord.py package it is necessary to uninstall Discord.py before installing pycord, this will ensure there are no conflicts.
• Datetimes have been made timezone aware, this breaks some code using datetimes on any Discord object.
• It’s my opinion that adding yet another bot client class is adding more bloat.

How To Migrate

Thankfully migrating isn’t too difficult with either nextcord or pycord.

Migrating to nextcord

1. Uninstall Discord.py by running pip uninstall discord.py
2. Install nextcord by running pip install nextcord
3. Search for discord in all of your bot’s files and replace it with nextcord Watch out for webhooks, you’ll need to make sure they don’t get changed to nextcord.com
4. Anywhere that you’re using thing_url you’ll need to change to thing.url. Do a search and replace for all of these converting the _ to a .
   1. avatar_url -> avatar.url
   2. banner_url -> banner.url
   3. default_avatar_url -> default_avatar.url
   4. icon_url -> icon.url
5. If you’re using the Discord.py webhook implementation you’ll need to change adapter=AsyncWebhookAdapter(session) to adpater=session.

Migrating to pycord

1. Uninstall Discord.py by running pip uninstall discord.py
2. Install pycord by running pip install pycord

Migrating Datetimes

Python has two kinds of datetimes: naive and timezone aware. Naive datetimes have no timezone set while timezone aware datetimes have a timezone. Because Python doesn’t know the timezone for a naive datetime you cannot do math or compare them with a timezone aware datetime.

Both nextcord and pycord inherited a breaking change from Discord.py that changed all datetimes on Discord objects from naive to aware. So to fix that, anywhere that you have a time comparison or are doing math with one, you need to make your datetime timezone aware.

The good news is, it’s fairly simple to do, as Discord objects are all using UTC. Do this to all of your datetimes:

from datetime import timezone

...
your_datetime.astimezone(timezone.utc)

Thanks For Reading

I hope you found this helpful! If you have any questions or need any further help feel free to hit me up on Discord (where I’m Zech) or Twitter.