How to loop a task in discord.py

Question

I am experimenting with making my own little discord bot that can get information from Twitch, but I'm stumped on how to make the bot loop and check for a condition.

I want the bot to loop a section of code every few seconds that checks if the specified twitch channel is live.

---

Code

import discord
from discord.ext import commands, tasks
from twitch import TwitchClient
from pprint import pformat


client = TwitchClient(client_id='<twitch token>')

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix='$')

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print('We have logged in as {0.user}'.format(bot))

@bot.command()
async def info(ctx, username):
    response = await ctx.send("Querying twitch database...")
    try:
        users = client.users.translate_usernames_to_ids(username)
        for user in users:
            print(user.id)
            userid = user.id
        twitchinfo = client.users.get_by_id(userid)
        status = client.streams.get_stream_by_user(userid)
        if status == None:
            print("Not live")
            livestat = twitchinfo.display_name + "is not live"
        else:
            livestat = twitchinfo.display_name + " is " + status.stream_type
        responsemsg = pformat(twitchinfo) + "\n" + livestat
        await response.edit(content=responsemsg)
    except:
        await response.edit(content="Invalid username")

bot.run("<discord token>")

---

I want the bot to run the following code every 10 seconds, for example:

status = client.streams.get_stream_by_user(<channel id>)
if status == None:
     print("Not live")
     livestat = twitchinfo.display_name + "is not live"
else:
     livestat = twitchinfo.display_name + " is " + status.stream_type

---

I've tried using @tasks.loop(seconds=10) to try and make a custom async def repeat every 10 seconds but it didn't seem to work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The newer version of discord.py doesn't support client.command()

To achieve the same I used the following snippet

import discord
from discord.ext import tasks

client = discord.Client()

@tasks.loop(seconds = 10) # repeat after every 10 seconds
async def myLoop():
    # work


myLoop.start()

client.run('<your token>')

Answer 2

This can be done like so:

async def my_task(ctx, username):
    while True:
        # do something
        await asyncio.sleep(10)

@client.command()
async def info(ctx, username):
    client.loop.create_task(my_task(ctx, username))

---

References:

• asyncio.create_task()
• asyncio.sleep()

Answer 3

This is the most proper way to implement background tasks.

from discord.ext import commands, tasks

bot = commands.Bot(...)

@bot.listen()
async def on_ready():
    task_loop.start() # important to start the loop

@tasks.loop(seconds=10)
async def task_loop():
    ... # this code will be executed every 10 seconds after the bot is ready

Check this for more info