Barista

Barista is a modular Discord bot governed entirely from a web dashboard. Design and administer your servers (channels, roles, permissions), install features as modules/plugins, and enable or disable them per server or globally — without restarting the bot.

⚠️ Status: early / foundational. The project is in active bootstrap. APIs, schema and module contract may change until the first stable milestone.

ℹ️ Barista is a provisional codename. The architecture does not depend on it, so the product name may change without affecting the data model or the module contract.

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Why Barista

Running a Discord server of any size means juggling the Discord app (channels, roles, permissions, AutoMod) and several bots, each with its own limited web panel. Every bot solves one slice, none integrate, and your configuration ends up scattered.

Barista unifies that into one modular bot driven from one web dashboard. The operator designs and administers the server and turns capabilities on or off as modules — per server or globally. The differentiator versus commercial bots: the contract is yours (you can write your own modules) and everything lives in a single installation you control.

Features

• Full web control of administration — create, edit, reorder and delete channels, categories and roles, and adjust permission overwrites, without opening the Discord app.
• Real modularity — adding a module never requires touching the core: implement the contract and drop it into the modules folder.
• Per-server and global toggle — enabling/disabling a module takes effect in seconds and without restarting the process.
• Frictionless configuration — each module's settings form is auto-generated from its schema; adding an option requires no UI work.
• Secure by default — no dashboard action runs without verifying that the user has permission over that server at that moment.

Architecture at a glance

Barista is a monorepo with three applications and shared packages:

Layer	Package	Notes
Bot	apps/bot	Connects to the Discord Gateway (discord.js + Sapphire); runs modules.
Backend API	apps/api	Dashboard backend (Hono on Bun); OAuth2 via Discord.
Frontend	apps/dashboard	React + Vite single-page app.
Core	packages/core	Module contract, registry, and per-guild event router.
Data	packages/db	PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM. Module config stored as JSONB.
Discord	packages/discord	REST/permissions/hierarchy layer with rate-limit handling.
Config	packages/config	Environment validation (fails fast on missing secrets).

Two communication planes talk to Discord: the REST API (with the bot token) executes actions and does not require the bot to be connected, while the Gateway (WebSocket) receives real-time events. Redis carries internal pub/sub between the API and the bot, which keeps the hot path off the database and makes toggles near-instant.

                ┌─────────────┐        ┌──────────────┐
  Operator ───▶ │  dashboard  │ ◀────▶ │     api      │ ───▶ Discord REST
  (browser)     │ React + Vite│  REST  │ Hono on Bun  │ ───▶ PostgreSQL
                └─────────────┘   +WS   └──────┬───────┘
                                               │ Redis pub/sub
                                        ┌──────┴───────┐
              Discord Gateway ────────▶ │     bot      │ ───▶ Discord REST
                                        │ discord.js   │ ───▶ PostgreSQL
                                        └──────────────┘

Tech stack

• Runtime / packaging: Bun workspaces, Docker Compose.
• Bot: Node.js + discord.js on Sapphire.
• API: Hono on Bun, OAuth2 with Discord.
• Frontend: React + Vite.
• Data: PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM.
• Validation: Zod (config schemas drive auto-generated UI).
• Messaging/cache: Redis pub/sub.
• Testing: Vitest (unit + integration), Playwright (end-to-end).
• Language: TypeScript in strict mode across the monorepo.

Scope

In scope (v1): designing and operating Discord servers where the bot is already present — channels, categories, roles, permission overwrites, module management, slash commands provided by active modules, audit logging, and real-time dashboard updates.

Out of scope (v1): creating servers from scratch at scale (Discord API limitation), selfbots/user-account automation (against Discord ToS), a public third-party plugin marketplace, and multi-tenant single installations. These are deferred or explicitly excluded.

Getting started

The bootstrap toolchain (workspaces, database, and services) is being set up. Once the initial scaffold lands, this section will document bun install, environment configuration, and docker compose up.

Planned local stack: apps/{bot, api, dashboard} plus postgres and redis services, wired through Docker Compose, with environment variables validated at startup.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for the development workflow, coding conventions, and the project's hard rules (security boundaries, testing expectations, commit format). All participation is governed by our Code of Conduct.

Security

Found a vulnerability? Please follow the responsible-disclosure process in SECURITY.md. Because the bot holds administrative permissions on third-party servers, security reports are taken seriously and handled privately.

License

Barista is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for the full text. In short: you may use, study, modify and redistribute the software, but if you run a modified version as a network service, you must make the corresponding source available to its users.