discord-retention-bot

A bot that allows you to set a message retention for individual Discord text channels.

Table of contents

• Features
• Preparation
• Installation
• Configuration
• Troubleshooting
• Integration tests

Features

• Automatically delete messages that are older than a configured time
• Don't delete pinned messages until configured otherwise
• Multi channel configuration (e.g. keep messages #general for two weeks, but #random for one day)
• Default configuration for all channels without definend retention

Preparation

Before running your bot you need to create it on Discord:

1. Create a Discord Application in the Discord Developer Portal
2. Go to Bot and click Add Bot and make sure to uncheck Public bot
3. Copy the CLIENT ID from the General Information tab
4. Go to https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=$CLIENT_ID&scope=bot&permissions=74752 and add your bot to your Discord server

Wait, what does 74752 mean?

74752 is the bitmask for the following permissions:

• View Channels
• Manage Messages
• Read Message History

You can verify this by checking these in the Bot Permissions mask on your bots page.

Installation

Download binary

Go to the GitHub Releases and download the binary for your architecture.

Docker

You can use the provided Docker image at docker.pkg.github.com/bahlo/discord-retention-bot/discord-retention-bot:1.0.2.

Cargo

Run cargo install discord-retention-bot to install the latest version from crates.io.

Build from source

1. Clone the repository with git clone https://github.com/bahlo/discord-retention-bot
2. Run cargo build --release to build your binary to target/release/discord-retention-bot

Configuration

Configure your bot via environment variables (optionally in an .env file).

RUST_LOG

Tihs defines the log level. I recommend setting this to discord-retention-bot=info for normal usage.

DISCORD_TOKEN

The token of your Discord bot. Get it from the Discord Developer Portal by going to your application → Bot and copying the token.

DELETE_PINNED

Can be set to true or false. If set to true, pinned messages will also be deleted. Defaults to false.

CHANNEL_RETENTION

A list of channel names and the duration after which messages should be deleted, separated by a comma. You can also configure * to match all unconfigured channnels. The duration is a number followed by one of h (hours), d (days), and w (weeks). Please note that this configuration applies to all guilds your bot is added to.

Example

general:2w,random:4d,*:4w will result in messages being deleted in

• general: after two weeks
• random: after four days
• every other channel after four weeks

Troubleshooting

Why is it taking so long?

Discord might be rate-limiting you. This applications uses the single message delete endpoint because Bulk Delete Messages doesn't support messages older than 2 weeks. It might take a while the first time, but it will get faster.

It's not deleting the messages of a channel

Make sure the bot has access to that channel in the Discord application and the following permissions:

• Read Text Channels & See Voice Channels
• Manage Messages
• Read Message History

Integration tests

To run integration tests you need to create a bot (see Preparation), but with the bitmask 76816, which translates to:

• Manage Channels
• View Channels
• Send Messages
• Manage Messages
• Read Message History

Export the bot token to INTEGRATION_DISCORD_TOKEN and run cargo test -- --ignored to run the integration tests.