Welcome to setting up your own Discord bot! I tried to write this guide to be as friendly to new users as possible, even if you don't have any experience coding. Setting up a bot like this for the first time isn't easy but it's also not too difficult. If this is your first time, it will hopefully only take an hour or so.

Risks of running your own bot locally

There are always risks with running software that connects to the internet, but especially so with software that processes unknown users' requests and runs on your personal hardware. You should make sure you understand the risks associated with setting up your own copy of this bot and running it locally (aka on hardware you own).

Resources

This bot in its current state is meant to only be used on a relatively small server (probably fewer than a few hundred people), and not installed on many servers simultaneously (less than ten). The intention is to eventually support sharding the bot so many instances can be spun up simultaneously and support many requests, but currently it can't support many requests simultaneously.

The database itself could start holding hundreds or thousands of records, taking up precious space on your computer. Many commands are rate limited, but not by much (cooldowns are only a second or two). If there are too many simultaneous requests, it could eat resources from other important processes, so be mindful if you're hosting locally on your main desktop where you game or work. Limit your bot's audience as much as possible unless you intend to host the bot on an external platform eventually (or on your own dedicated server hardware).

Security

I've taken some precautions to make sure users can't break the bot or insert anything via text responses that would harm the computer running the bot. But as with any computer program, it's not invulnerable. Especially as the bot gets older and new exploits are found, certain packages this bot relies on may become vulnerable, meaning running your own bot locally can make your computer vulnerable. Limiting your bot's audience can help tremendously with this issue, and making sure not to install the bot on servers where there's a large audience of people you don't know will help ensure there are fewer bad actors trying to get malware onto your computer.