letterboxd-discord-bot

Overview

This a simple bot that posts new diary entries from your Letterboxd friends to your preferred Discord channel.

Add to your Discord server!

Use this handy link to add the bot.

Or follow the instructions below on how to host the bot yourself.

Slash Commands

• /add - Subscribes to a Letterboxd user’s new diary entries
• /remove - Unsubscribe a Letterboxd user
• /list - See a list of all the current users
• /channel - Update which channel to post to. (Defaults to the system channel)
• /snooze - Mute a user’s posts for N hours (max 720); pass 0 to unsnooze

How it works

Right now all this bot does is scrape RSS feeds to find the latest entry. I’m hoping to get access to Letterboxd API to introduce new functionality.

[!NOTE] If you want more than just a diary poster, check out Filmlinkd — a more feature-rich Letterboxd Discord bot.

How to run the bot yourself

Initial setup

Clone this repo to your computer.

git clone git@github.com:caseypugh/letterboxd-discord-bot.git
cd letterboxd-discord-bot

Make sure you have Node 24 installed. If you’re using nvm…

nvm install 24
nvm use 24

Create an .env from the sample file and fill in your Discord credentials.

cp .env.sample .env

Data is stored in SQLite via Prisma — no database server needed. Locally the database is just a file at prisma/dev.db, created automatically the first time you run migrations. In production the bot talks to a hosted Turso database over libSQL.

Development

Install dependencies once:

pnpm install

Then bring up the whole dev environment with one command:

pnpm up

This applies any pending migrations to the local SQLite file and runs the bot with hot reload.

If you’d rather run the pieces separately:

pnpm db:migrate        # apply migrations (creates prisma/dev.db)
pnpm dev               # run the bot

Deployment

The bot is a long-running worker (Discord gateway + a 1-minute cron loop). It needs an always-on host plus a database. A Dockerfile is included so you can deploy to any container platform.

Recommended: Fly.io + Turso (~$0/mo for the database)

1. Create a database on Turso — the free plan is far more than this bot needs:

   turso db create letterboxd-bot
   turso db show letterboxd-bot --url   # -> libsql://letterboxd-bot-<org>.turso.io
   turso db tokens create letterboxd-bot
   

2. Install flyctl and run fly launch --no-deploy --copy-config from the repo root. If the app name letterboxd-discord-bot is taken, Fly will prompt you for a different one — update fly.toml to match.
3. Set secrets:

   fly secrets set \
     DISCORD_CLIENT_ID=... \
     DISCORD_TOKEN=... \
     TURSO_DATABASE_URL='libsql://letterboxd-bot-<org>.turso.io' \
     TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN='...'
   

4. Deploy: fly deploy — schema migrations are applied automatically on startup.

Migrating data from an existing Postgres database

If you’re moving off a previous Postgres deployment (e.g. Neon), stop the bot, apply the schema to Turso, then copy the rows with the included one-off script:

TURSO_DATABASE_URL='libsql://...' TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN='...' pnpm db:deploy
POSTGRES_URL='postgresql://...' \
  TURSO_DATABASE_URL='libsql://...' TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN='...' \
  NODE_PATH=./ pnpm exec ts-node src/tools/migrate-data.ts

Auto-deploy via GitHub Actions

A workflow at .github/workflows/deploy.yml deploys to Fly on every push to main. To use it on your fork:

1. Run fly tokens create deploy and copy the token.
2. Add it to your repo’s secrets as FLY_API_TOKEN (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions).
3. Push to main.

Other platforms

The included Dockerfile works on any container host — Railway, Render, DigitalOcean, a VPS, etc. The bot needs four env vars: DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_TOKEN, TURSO_DATABASE_URL, TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN. (Alternatively, on a host with a persistent volume you can skip Turso entirely and set DATABASE_URL=file:/path/to/bot.db.)

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