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Cog-Creators/Red-DiscordBot
A multi-function Discord bot
Red is a self-hosted, modular Discord bot framework for Python built on discord.py — moderation, music, trivia, economy, and more, all as independently loadable 'cogs'. It's aimed at server admins who want a batteries-included bot without writing code, and at Python devs who want a plugin architecture to build their own cogs on top of.
Been actively maintained for a decade with a real release cadence, CI, and a large third-party cog ecosystem browsable at index.discord.red. The Config abstraction over JSON/Postgres storage and the hot load/unload cog system are genuinely solid patterns if you're building a plugin-based bot yourself. Docs are unusually thorough for a Discord bot project — per-cog guides, framework API docs on readthedocs, i18n via Crowdin into 40+ languages.
This is a sprawling general-purpose bot, not a lean library — the audio cog alone pulls in a Lavalink dependency and is one of the heavier, more failure-prone parts of the codebase historically. Self-hosted only with no managed option, so you're signing up for ongoing maintenance and updates on your own infra. GPLv3 means anything you build directly into it as a fork needs to stay open. If you just want a minimal custom bot, adopting Red means inheriting its full cog ecosystem and opinions rather than starting from a clean slate.