Overview

Vaultbot is a Discord bot that allows users to add songs from Spotify to a managed playlist. After two weeks, the songs are removed, thereby keeping the playlist fresh.

After a few years of running the original Vaultbot, I decided to rewrite the bot in Go. I originally started the rewrite back in 2023, but have recently in 2025 taken a renewed interest in the project (mostly because I was listening to a lot less music in general and missed the good old days).

The original bot was written in Python and was starting to show its age. The new bot is more efficient and has a more robust architecture. Numerous quality of life improvements have been made:

User-facing

• Slash commands for a more intuitive user experience
• User-configurable settings
• Blacklist for songs, artists, and genres

Behind the scenes:

• Go for strong typing and improved performance
• Improved error handling and logging
• Vertical slice architecture for better separation of concerns
• Sidecar container for database migrations
• Dockerized for easier deployment (including a Docker Compose file for local development)
• Terraform for infrastructure as code
• GitHub Actions for CI/CD

Technologies

The entire stack is hosted on DigitalOcean. The bot is written in Go and uses the discordgo library. The backend is written in Go and uses sqlx as a query builder. GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines are used to automatically deploy the infrastructure and application to DigitalOcean.