This page is dedicated to helping you get started on your way to making the next great Discord bot or client with DiscordGo. Once you've done that please don't forget to submit it to the Awesome DiscordGo list :).
First, lets cover a few topics so you can make the best choices on how to move forward from here.
A bot application is a special program that interacts with the Discord servers to perform some form of automation or provide some type of service. Examples are things like number trivia games, music streaming, channel moderation, sending reminders, playing loud airhorn sounds, comic generators, YouTube integration, Twitch integration... You're almost only limited by your imagination.
Bot applications require the use of a special Bot account. These accounts are tied to your personal user account. Bot accounts cannot login with the normal user clients and they cannot join servers the same way a user does. They do not have access to some user client specific features however they gain access to many Bot specific features.
To create a new bot account first create yourself a normal user account on Discord then visit the My Applications page and click on the New Application box. Follow the prompts from there to finish creating your account.
More information about Bot vs Client accounts can be found here.
DiscordGo requires Go version 1.4 or higher. It has been tested to compile and run successfully on Debian Linux 8, FreeBSD 10, and Windows 7. It is expected that it should work anywhere Go 1.4 or higher works. If you run into problems please let us know :).
You must already have a working Go environment setup to use DiscordGo. If you are new to Go and have not yet installed and tested it on your computer then please visit this page first then I highly recommend you walk though A Tour of Go to help get your familiar with the Go language. Also checkout the relevent Go plugin for your editor — they are hugely helpful when developing Go code.
Like any other Go package the fist step is to go get the package. This will
always pull the latest tagged release from the master branch. Then run
go install to compile and install the libraries on your system.
Run go get to download the package to your GOPATH/src folder.
go get github.com/bwmarrin/discordgoFinally, compile and install the package into the GOPATH/pkg folder. This isn't absolutely required but doing this will allow the Go plugin for your editor to provide autocomplete for all DiscordGo functions.
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/bwmarrin/discordgo
go installPlaceholder.
More coming soon.