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.

NOTE: Add at your own risk! I have no intentions of maintaining this hosted bot and could likely shut down in the near future. If you’d like to use something more reliable check out the Filmlinkd bot.

• Add to Server

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)

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. If you are looking for more features, check out Filmlinkd.

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 Postgres via Prisma. The repo includes a docker-compose.yml for local development — start it with:

docker compose up -d

This runs Postgres 17 on localhost:5432 with the credentials already wired into .env.sample. To stop it: docker compose down. Data persists in a Docker volume between restarts.

If you’d rather use a Postgres install of your own, just update DATABASE_URL in .env.

Development

Install dependencies once:

yarn install

Then bring up the whole dev environment with one command:

yarn up

This starts the local Postgres container (waits for it to be healthy), applies any pending migrations, and runs the bot with hot reload.

If you’d rather run the pieces separately:

docker compose up -d   # start Postgres
yarn db:migrate        # apply migrations
yarn 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 Postgres database. A Dockerfile is included so you can deploy to any container platform.

Recommended: Fly.io + Neon (~$0–5/mo)

1. Create a Postgres database on Neon and copy the connection string.
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=... \
     DATABASE_URL='postgresql://...neon.tech/...?sslmode=require'
   

4. Deploy: fly deploy

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 three env vars: DISCORD_CLIENT_ID, DISCORD_TOKEN, DATABASE_URL (Postgres).

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