Helply¶

A user-friendly Python library designed to streamline the creation of "help" commands for Discord bots using application commands within the disnake library. This library will automatically parse your commands and provide details for each command, such as name, description, role and permission checks, etc. As I'm a user of the disnake library, this is designed to be used with that project, but I do plan to add support for others in the future

Key Features¶

• Consolidating various attributes from InvokableApplicationCommand and APIApplicationCommand into a single cached object.
• Parsing role and permission checks.
• Utility functions that provide ready-to-go embeds and pagination.
• Support localizing commands and arguments (New in version 0.3.0)
• Parsing command cooldowns (New in version 0.4.0)

Installation¶

To install the helply package, you will need git. If you don't have git installed on your system, you can download it from here.

Once you have git installed, run the following command inside your Python environment to install the package:

pip install git+https://github.com/dlchamp/Helply

Usage¶

After installing the package, you can use it in your project by importing it as follows:

from helply import Helply

AppCommands will be created and cached upon first use of helply to retrieve commands. This allows all commands to become registered with Discord before helply steps in to create it's own objects with the consolidated attributes provided by InvokableApplicationCommand and APIApplicationCommand

Description parsing¶

Disnake will automatically parse your command descriptions from the docstring in your callback function, or by populating the description keyword argument. Helply uses that description, however, it also parses descriptions found in the extras key-word argument when it finds the "help" key. This proves exceptionally useful for menu commands that do not normally have a description that is displayed by the user's client.

Example - User Command:

# Since this is a user command that does not inherently have a description. We are using
# extras to set the description for the help command.
@bot.user_command(name="View Avatar", extras={"help": "Display the target user's avatar"})
async def view_avatar(...):
    ...

While designed to allow command descriptions for your menu commands, you may also use this feature to create longer descriptions for your slash commands as it would appear in your help response. For slash commands, this is really only useful if you wish to provide more information that would normally exceed the 100 character limit set by Discord.

In this example, the user will see "Kick a member from the server" when attempting to use the command while "Removes the target member from the guild" will appear as the command description in the help response.

@bot.slash_command(
    name="kick",
    extras={"help": "Removes the target member from the guild"}
)
async def kick_member(...):
    """Kick a member from the server"""

Support for @commands Checks¶

The helply library also supports parsing of @commands style checks. For instance, if you are using @commands.has_permissions() to restrict command usage, the extension will recognize and display these permission requirements in the help response.

Example:

@bot.slash_command(name="kick")
@commands.has_permissions(kick_members=True)
async def kick_member(inter: disnake.GuildCommandInteraction, member: disnake.Member):
    """Kick a member from the server

    Parameters
    ----------
    member: Select a member to kick
    """

Cogs, Categories, and disnake-ext-plugin support¶

Helply is able to parse the cog or category a command belongs to. This is useful if you wish to display an overview of command available within a category. If you're using disnake-ext-plugins, a "plugin" key is automatically set within the command's extras dict and its value will be used instead.
Finally, you may overwrite this category simply by assigning a value to a "category" key in the command's extras.

The following order of priority is used to set a command's category.

1. A check for a "category" key in command.extras
2. A check for a "plugin" key in command.extras
3. The cog associated with the command, if applicable
4. If all previous checks fail, category is set to ""

An example of manually setting or overriding a command's category:

@some_plugin.slash_command(name='command', extras={"category": "General"})
async def some_command(inter: disnake.ApplicationCommandInteractions):
    ...

Filtering Commands¶

When retrieving commands from Helply, you may choose to pass in a member's guild_permissions. This will ensure that only commands the user has permissions to use will be retrieved.

Here, if the command is used within a guild, we want to show all commands available within the guild, including global commands, and only commands that the inter.author is able to use.

# construct Helply with the provided bot and a sequence of commands to ignore
# ignored commands will not appear in any help responses.
helply = Helply(bot, commands_to_ignore=('help',))

@bot.slash_command(name='help')
async def help_command(inter: disnake.ApplicationCommandInteraction):

    if inter.guild:
        guild_id = inter.guild_id
        permissions = inter.author.guild_permissions
        dm_only = False
    else:
        # command likely used in direct message
        guild_id = None
        permissions = None
        dm_only = True

    commands = helply.get_commands(
        guild_id, permissions=permissions, dm_only=dm_only, locale=inter.locale
    )

Support¶

Join the discord to get support or just chat.