Discord bot throwing NoneType error when starting up

Other Questions Discord bot
1

My Discord bot keeps crashing with this error message:

TypeError: expected token to be a str, received NoneType instead

Here’s my bot code:

import discord
import os

permissions = discord.Intents.default()
permissions.typing = False
permissions.presences = False
bot = discord.Client(intents=permissions)

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print('Bot is online as {0.user}'.format(bot))

@bot.event
async def on_message(msg):
    if msg.author == bot.user:
        return

    if msg.content.startswith('!greet'):
        await msg.channel.send('Hi there!')

bot.run(os.getenv('BOT_TOKEN'))

I’m pretty new to making Discord bots and I can’t figure out what’s going wrong. The error happens right when I try to start the bot. I’ve checked other similar questions but none of the solutions worked for me. Any ideas on how to fix this?

2

Your token retrieval is broken. os.getenv('BOT_TOKEN') returns None because the environment variable isn’t set up right. I hit this same issue when I started with Discord bots. You’ve got two options: set the environment variable on your system, or make a .env file in your project folder with BOT_TOKEN=your_actual_token_here. If you go the .env route, install python-dotenv first, then add from dotenv import load_dotenv and load_dotenv() at the top of your script before the os.getenv call. Also double-check you copied the token correctly from Discord Developer Portal - no extra spaces or weird characters.

3

looks like your BOT_TOKEN ain’t set right. make sure it’s in your env or .env file - os.getenv() is returning None, so discord can’t see the token.

4

Had this exact problem three months ago with my first bot. Yeah, os.getenv('BOT_TOKEN') is returning None, but check something else too - sometimes the token gets corrupted when you copy-paste from Discord Developer Portal. I had to regenerate the token completely and make sure I didn’t grab any whitespace. Also, if you’re testing locally vs deploying on Heroku, the environment variable setup is different for each. Try printing os.getenv('BOT_TOKEN') right before bot.run() to see what value it’s actually pulling.