Self-hosting - Welcome-Bot

We ask you to please not host your own instance of Welcome-Bot. Even though our license allows it, self-hosted instances of the bot have brought us a lot of headache in the past. If you’re considering self-hosting, please try the official instance of the bot first. If you have any concerns about the security of our instance, please contact us. We’d love to talk and answer any questions you have.

If you’re really really really going to self-host the bot, please read our license first, and be aware that we don’t provide any self-hosting support which is up to date. You’ll be on your own.

The self-hosting docs below are archived, you may host older versions of Welcome-Bot, I am sure v1.5 and older will work, but not after that version. By self-hosting, you are losing a lot of features, we recommend to not self host your own instance of Welcome-Bot.

Some of you may want to self-host the bot on your own VPS/server. This page explains how you can self-host the bot for yourself.

Important! By selfhosting the bot will you agree to the following terms:

• You follow the LGPL-v2.1-License of the bot.
  • This means that you give credit to the original author (Welcome-bot team & contributors) and won’t claim this code as your own.
• You aknowledge and agree that you won’t receive any support for your self-hosted bot.

Requirements

Before you can run the bot will you need to make sure that the following requirements are met.

MongoDB

You need to have MongoDB installed and running on your server, where the bot will later run.

Node

You need at least Node 12 to be installed and working. Newer versions of Node should work too.

Get source code

Just run npm i welcome-bot to install using npm OR you can download archive from releases page.

.env

The .env is the environment vars of the bot in which you set various different information that will be used by the bot. To create it, first copy .env.example as .env, then add your bot token

Note that you don’t have to set values for every option in .env file. If you followed the previous step on preparing the bot will you only need to set the following options:

Option:	Value required:
NODE_ENV	Better to set this to production when self-hosting
BOT_TOKEN	Valid Bot-token of your Bot-application to login.
MONGODB_URL	Valid URL provided by MongoDB when creating DB.
BOT_PREFIX	Default prefix of the bot