local_development.md

Local Development

This section covers running and developing Tux directly on your local machine, which is the recommended approach.

Running the Bot:

1. Push Database Schema: If this is your first time setting up or if you've made changes to schema.prisma, push the schema to your development database. This command also generates the Prisma client.

   # Ensure you use --dev or rely on the default development mode
   poetry run tux --dev db push

   You can explicitly regenerate the Prisma client anytime with poetry run tux --dev db generate.

2. Start the Bot:

   Start the bot in development mode:

   poetry run tux --dev start

   This command will:

   • Read DEV_DATABASE_URL and DEV_BOT_TOKEN from your .env file.
   • Connect to the development database.
   • Authenticate with Discord using the development token.
   • Load all cogs.
   • Start the Discord bot.
   • Enable the built-in Hot Reloading system.

Hot Reloading:

The project includes a hot-reloading utility (tux/utils/hot_reload.py).

When the bot is running locally via poetry run tux --dev start, this utility watches for changes in the tux/cogs/ directory. It attempts to automatically reload modified cogs or cogs affected by changes in watched utility files without requiring a full bot restart.

This significantly speeds up development for cog-related changes. Note that changes outside the watched directories (e.g., core bot logic, dependencies) may still require a manual restart (Ctrl+C and run the start command again).