Discord Bot RuntimeError - Event Loop Already Running Issue

Other Questions Discord bot
1

Getting stuck with my Discord bot setup and need some guidance.

I’m fairly new to Discord bot development and running into a frustrating problem. Every time I try to start my bot, I get this error message: RuntimeError: Cannot close a running event loop

The issue happens when I call the run method on my bot client. I’ve been searching for solutions but nothing seems to work so far.

Here’s the basic code I’m using:

import discord

bot_client = discord.Client()
bot_client.run('MY_BOT_TOKEN')

I’ve already attempted several fixes including installing nest_asyncio package, but that didn’t resolve the problem. Also tested this across multiple Python versions (3.6, 3.7, and 3.8) with the same results. My setup is running on Windows 10 with Anaconda distribution.

Has anyone encountered this same event loop error before? Would really appreciate any suggestions or workarounds that might help get this working.

2

This happens when you’re running your bot somewhere that already has an event loop running. I’ve hit this same issue with Discord bots in interactive environments. Here’s what fixed it for me: don’t call bot_client.run() directly. Instead, wrap your code in an async function and use asyncio.create_task() or asyncio.ensure_future(). You can also check if there’s already a loop running with asyncio.get_running_loop() and handle it from there. If you’re using PyCharm or VS Code with interactive features, try running from command line instead. These IDEs sometimes create background event loops that mess with your bot.

3

Had this exact issue with my first bot last year. The problem’s usually from running bot code where there’s already an active event loop - happens a lot in Jupyter notebooks or certain IDEs. Skip bot_client.run() and use the async approach instead: bot_client.start() and bot_client.close(). You’ll need to wrap your code in an async function and use asyncio.run() to execute it. Also check you’re not calling the run method multiple times in your script. What really helped me was completely restarting my Python interpreter between test runs - sometimes the event loop state gets cached. If you’re still stuck, see if there’s other asyncio stuff running in the background that might mess with the bot’s event loop initialization.

4

run ur script in the cmd, not the IDE. i faced the same prob with spyder - that thing makes its own event loop which clashes with discord.py. also, make sure there’s no other asyncio code running before ur bot starts, or it might mess things up.