Building a Discord Chatbot with Python (2) - Setting Up the Development Environment
In this article, we’ll prepare the development environment to build a Discord chatbot in Python.
We’ll be utilizing the discord.py library.
Ensure you have Python version 3.8 or higher to use this library.
1. Create a Working Directory
Let’s begin by creating a working directory named discord-chatbot
.
All our operations will be performed within this directory.
Building a Discord Chatbot with Python (1) - An Introduction
In this guide, we’ll create a “chatbot”, a program that automatically responds to messages in a chat using Python.
Developing a chatbot is a rewarding next step for beginners who have just completed their basic tutorials or courses.
Over the course of several articles, we’ll add various features to our chatbot, making it more versatile and interactive.
Goals of This Series
Throughout this series, we aim to add the following functions to our chatbot:
Quick Note on venv: Python Virtual Environment Library
This is a quick note on how to use venv, a Python library for creating virtual environments.
List of Commands
-
Creating a virtual environment:
Quick Note on pyenv: Python Version Management Tool
This is a quick note on how to use pyenv, a tool for switching between different Python versions.
List of Commands
For Installing Python
-
Display the list of installed Python versions:
Implementing TTL Cache in Python (3)
In this article, we will extend our previously implemented TTL cache decorator with a toggle feature for enabling and disabling the cache.
Overview of Cache Toggle Feature
Here are the specifications for the new cache toggle feature:
- Functions decorated with
lru_cache
will have an additionaluse_cache
argument, allowing one to toggle the cache functionality. - If
use_cache
is set toFalse
, the function will execute without using the cache,
but its result will still be stored in the cache. - If toggled back to
use_cache=True
, the cached content will be utilized.
Implementation
There are various possible ways to implement this feature. Here’s how I approached it:
Implementing TTL Cache in Python (2)
Overview
Continuing from our last article, we’ll delve deeper into implementing a cache with Time-to-Live (TTL).
Let’s quickly recap what we covered previously.Summary of Part 1
- We learned how to equip functions with cache capabilities using
lru_cache
. - We implemented the
get_ttl_hash
function, which updates return values at specified intervals. - We were able to give functions TTL caching by:
- Enhancing them with the caching functionality of
lru_cache
. - Adding a dummy argument.
- Inputting the return value of
get_ttl_hash
to the dummy argument.
- Enhancing them with the caching functionality of
Our goal in this article is to create a decorator that automates this process.
- Functions decorated with
-