Solbot

🏎️🏎️🏎️

Crypto Tipping Bot for the Solana Discord

Table of Contents

• Features
• Architecture
• Solana Specifics
• Deployment

Features

• send SOL to public keys or by tagging a discord user
• switch between clusters
• check your account balance
• one day (maybe :) ): ledger support, monikers (e.g. send 1 coffee)

Commands

You can interact with the bot using commands such as !help. In a public channel, you can only use the !send command. You can use all commands in a private DM channel with the bot.

Architecture

Discord Command Handler

This component faces the user and accept commands which it forwards to the other components.

DiscordId -> Public Key Storage

This is a persistent db. All it does is map discordIds to public keys. A user can use a command to save a public key for their discordId here. Then, users can send that user currency by simply tagging them in a message instead of having to write the public key.

Wallet

Regular wallet offering functions such as inspecting balance or sending currency. Forwards calls to the selected Solana cluster. Saves private key in memory while user is logged in.

PriceAPI

Provides the current USD value of SOL and some other price-related functions.

Solana Specifics

If you're interested in the specifics of using Solana, check out the solana package inside the src folder.

Connection

The main entrypoint to the cluster is the Connection on which methods such as getBalance or sendTransaction can be called. When creating a connection, you can specify a Commitment which tells the connection which slot to query when making a request e.g. when calling getBalance on a connection with commitment === max, it will return the balance of the given account in the latest finalised slot.

Convenience functions

The solana js library also provides a range of convenience functions to make common workflows easier to code e.g. web3.clusterApiUrl to convert a cluster name such as mainnet-beta to the url to connect to.

Transferring funds

Generally, all apps that want to interact with a Solana need to send transactions to it, that can include multiple instructions. These instructions are forwarded to programs deployed on-chain (each transaction references a programId that specifies which program should process the instruction).

All this holds true even for transferring funds and again the solana library provides helper functions for it. Specifically, we can use web3.SystemProgram.transfer to create a transaction that will be sent to the System Program which then adjusts account balances. The created transaction can then be sent using web3.sendAndConfirmTransaction.

Deployment

Discord Setup

1. Go to the discord developer portal and create a new application
2. Create a new bot. You can also give it an avatar. You'll need the bot token for later!
3. Go to https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=<YOUR_APPLICATION_CLIENT_ID>&scope=bot to add the bot to your server.

Local Deployment

1. Start a local postgresql for the Public Key Storage

   docker run -d -p 5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_USER=tipping-bot -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=tipping-bot-postgresql -e POSTGRES_DB=tipping-bot-postgresql --name tipping-bot-postgresql postgres:12.4-alpine
   

2. add a new secret folder inside src, add an .env file inside with the following content (DO NOT COMMIT THIS FILE):

   DISCORD_TOKEN=<YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>
   

3. run npm install

4. run npm run migrate

5. run npm start

Cloud Deployment

• Whatever deployment provider you choose, you will need
  • a postgres db
  • a node runtime
• The following environment variables should be set
  • NODE_ENV: "production"
  • DISCORD_TOKEN: <YOUR_BOT_TOKEN>
  • PROD_DB_USERNAME: <YOUR_DB_USERNAME,
  • PROD_DB_PASSWORD: <YOUR_DB_PASSWORD>,
  • PROD_DB_NAME: <YOUR_DB_NAME>,
  • PROD_DB_HOST: <YOUR_DB_HOST>,
  • PROD_DB_PORT: <YOUR_DB_PORT>,

1. With the above steps completed, you can start with npm install
2. Then run npm run migrate
3. Then run npm start