Creating slash commands

Creating slash commands

Discord allows developers to register slash commands, which provide users a first-class way of interacting directly with your application.

Slash commands provide a huge number of benefits over manual message parsing, including:

• Integration with the Discord client interface.
• Automatic command detection and parsing of the associated options/arguments.
• Typed argument inputs for command options, e.g. "String", "User", or "Role".
• Validated or dynamic choices for command options.
• In-channel private responses (ephemeral messages).
• Pop-up form-style inputs for capturing additional information.

...and many more!

Before you continue

Assuming you've followed the guide so far, your project directory should look something like this:

These steps can be followed in any order, but are all required to make your bot work. This page details step 1. Make sure you also check out the other linked pages.

Individual command files

Create a new folder named commands and a subfolder named utility inside it, which is where you'll store all of your utility command files. You'll be using the class to construct the command definitions.

At a minimum, the definition of a slash command must have a name and a description. Slash command names must be between 1-32 characters and contain no capital letters, spaces, or symbols other than - and _. Using the builder, a simple ping command definition would look like this:

new SlashCommandBuilder().setName('ping').setDescription('Replies with Pong!');

A slash command also requires a function to run when the command is used, to respond to the interaction. Using an interaction response method confirms to Discord that your bot successfully received the interaction, and has responded to the user. Discord enforces this to ensure that all slash commands provide a good user experience (UX). Failing to respond will cause Discord to show that the command failed, even if your bot is performing other actions as a result.

The simplest way to acknowledge and respond to an interaction is the interaction.reply() method. Other methods of replying are covered on the Response methods page later in this section.

async execute(interaction) {
	await interaction.reply('Pong!')
}

Put these two together by creating a ping.js file in the commands/utility folder for your first command. Inside this file, you're going to define and export two items.

• The data property, which will provide the command definition shown above for registering to Discord.
• The execute method, which will contain the functionality to run from our event handler when the command is used.

These are placed inside module.exports so they can be read by other files; namely the command loader and command deployment scripts mentioned earlier.

const { SlashCommandBuilder } = require('discord.js');

module.exports = {
	data: new SlashCommandBuilder().setName('ping').setDescription('Replies with Pong!'),
	async execute(interaction) {
		await interaction.reply('Pong!');
	},
};

That's it for your basic ping command. Below are examples of two more commands we're going to build upon throughout the guide, so create two more files for these before you continue reading.

const { SlashCommandBuilder } = require('discord.js');

module.exports = {
	data: new SlashCommandBuilder().setName('user').setDescription('Provides information about the user.'),
	async execute(interaction) {
		// interaction.user is the object representing the User who ran the command
		// interaction.member is the GuildMember object, which represents the user in the specific guild
		await interaction.reply(
			`This command was run by ${interaction.user.username}, who joined on ${interaction.member.joinedAt}.`,
		);
	},
};

Next steps

You can implement additional commands by creating new files within a dedicated subfolder in the commands folder, but these three are the ones we're going to use for the examples as we go on. For now let's move on to the code you'll need for command handling, to load the files and respond to incoming interactions.