How to Make Discord Bot Automatically Post Messages at Scheduled Time

Other Questions Discord bot
1

I want to build a discord bot that automatically posts weather updates every morning at 8 AM based on the user’s timezone. The bot should send temperature and precipitation data without anyone having to trigger it with a command.

Right now I have some helper functions that get the current time in “HH:MM:SS” format, but I can’t figure out how to make the bot check for the specific time and send messages automatically.

import discord
from discord.ext import commands
from timeUtils import getLocalTime

intents = discord.Intents.all()
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="?", intents=intents)
api_token = "your_token_here"

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print("Bot is online and ready!")

@bot.command()   
async def about(ctx):
    await ctx.send("Hi! I'm your daily weather bot!")
    await ctx.send("I post weather updates automatically at 8 AM each day.")

# This doesn't work - not sure how to trigger without command
if (getLocalTime() == '08:00:00'):
    async def daily_forecast(ctx):
        await ctx.send("Weather data will go here")
        await ctx.send("This message never appears")

bot.run(api_token)

I’ve tried different approaches but I can’t find a way to make the bot run functions automatically without using commands. The discord.py docs don’t seem to cover scheduled tasks clearly.

2

you could also throw asyncio.sleep in a while loop. while True: await asyncio.sleep(60) then check your time inside. not as clean as using tasks but it works if u don’t want extra imports. just run it as a background task or it’ll block everything.

3

Your code only checks the time once when it starts - you need it checking continuously. Use discord.py’s task extension for scheduled tasks. Here’s what you want:

from discord.ext import tasks

@tasks.loop(minutes=1)
async def check_weather_time():
    if getLocalTime() == '08:00:00':
        channel = bot.get_channel(your_channel_id)
        await channel.send("Weather data will go here")

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    print("Bot is online and ready!")
    check_weather_time.start()

I’ve run similar bots for months - this works great. The loop decorator checks every minute for 8 AM. Just remember to start the task in on_ready or it won’t work. Also, you’ll need to hardcode your channel ID since there’s no ctx in scheduled tasks.

4

Your conditional check only runs once when the bot starts up, not continuously. Use asyncio.create_task() with the schedule library instead of checking every minute - way more efficient than constant polling.

Here’s a cleaner approach:

import asyncio
import schedule
import threading

def job():
    asyncio.create_task(send_weather())

async def send_weather():
    channel = bot.get_channel(channel_id)
    await channel.send("Your weather data here")

schedule.every().day.at("08:00").do(job)

# Run scheduler in separate thread
def run_scheduler():
    while True:
        schedule.run_pending()
        time.sleep(60)

scheduler_thread = threading.Thread(target=run_scheduler)
scheduler_thread.start()

This schedules exactly at 8 AM instead of checking every minute. I’ve used this pattern for production bots and it handles timezone changes much better.