king

A tiny discord bot written in C. say "king" in a channel and it reacts with 👑.

Built with Cosmopolitan Libc, so the build produces a single Actually Portable Executable that runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.

Build (Docker-first)

Only Docker is required on the host — no cosmocc, clang, or other toolchains.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/SteveParson/king.git
cd king
# if you cloned without --recursive:
# git submodule update --init

make docker-test    # compile + run unit tests in Docker
make docker-king    # write ./king to the host via Docker
make docker-image   # build scratch runtime image (king:local)

Target	What it does
make docker-test	Build and run unit tests inside Docker
make docker-lint	clang-format + clang-tidy (LLVM 21) inside Docker
make docker-king	Produce ./king APE on the host (no local cosmocc)
make docker-image	Build king:local scratch image
make docker-run	Run king:local with .env or exported env vars

docker compose build test|lint|king works the same way if you prefer Compose.

Native build (optional)

If you want cosmocc on the machine itself:

make
make test

Run

export DISCORD_TOKEN='<your_token_here>'
./king

Or copy .env.sample to .env, fill in your token, and source it before running — or use Docker:

make docker-run
# equivalent: docker run --rm --env-file .env king:local

A pre-built image is also published to the GitHub Container Registry:

docker run -e DISCORD_TOKEN='<your_token_here>' ghcr.io/steveparson/king:latest

You need Message Content Intent enabled in the Discord Developer Portal.

Variable	Default	What it does
DISCORD_TOKEN	(required)	Bot token (no Bot prefix)
DISCORD_REPLY	(disabled)	Reply text, omit to disable
DISCORD_REACTION	👑	Reaction emoji
LOG_LEVEL	info	error, info, or debug

Test / lint

make docker-test
make docker-lint

How it works

~1000 lines of C. Connects to the Discord Gateway over WebSocket/TLS (mbedtls, vendored), listens for messages, checks for the word "king" (case-insensitive, whole-word match), and fires off a REST reply + reaction. Heartbeats, reconnects, the usual Gateway lifecycle stuff.

Things we cook in this repo might not be very baked, but from our bit of testing, it 'works'.