roger

An OpenRouter-backed Discord bot — the spiritual successor to roger-bot, my first-ever programming project. Same character, rebuilt from scratch on hosted models and modern tooling.

Roger is a single-guild, owner-gated Discord assistant with four separate "brains":

• Admin — an owner-only server concierge, reachable by /roger, a DM, or an @mention. Ask in plain language ("a read-only podcast channel under Media that DJs can post in") and it creates channels/roles and sets permissions through a small, hand-rolled tool loop, with short per-channel conversation memory so follow-ups have context. No agent framework.
• Ambient — a deadpan chat persona (via /chat, or any non-owner @mention/DM). No tools, no authority.
• Digest — a scheduled RSS/Atom summary posted to a channel.
• Giga Brain — an owner-only, read-only strategic-analysis mode, reachable by /gigabrain. It reviews live server state and reasons about it — never acts. Optionally also checks in on its own on a configurable interval, DMing the owner unprompted suggestions.

Design details — the routing table, the tool loop, the store schema, and the security invariants the source cites as (§N) — are in ARCHITECTURE.md.

Security posture

Security is structural, not prompt-deep:

• No privileged gateway intents. message_content, members, and presence stay off. Roger only sees content in DMs, @mentions, and its own messages — exactly what it needs.
• Owner-gated. Admin actions require user.id == OWNER_ID, checked before a single token is spent. Everyone else gets a canned reply and an audit row.
• Least privilege. Never requests Administrator. Roles it creates always have zero permissions; access is granted through channel overwrites. No delete, kick, ban, or purge tools exist — Roger creates and adjusts, never destroys, and every change to existing state is owner-confirmed.
• Budgeted. Per-brain daily token caps and a hard cap on tool calls per request.
• No secrets in git — ever, not even encrypted. Secrets live in a sops+age-encrypted roger.env on the host; the repo carries only .sops.yaml and roger.env.example.
• Signed, scanned supply chain. CI audits deps (pip-audit) and scans the image (Trivy, build → scan → push); releases are signed keyless with cosign and the deploy host verifies the signature before it runs — a bad or unsigned image fails the deploy closed.

Stack

Python 3.12 · discord.py · the OpenAI SDK pointed at OpenRouter · pydantic · aiosqlite · feedparser. Runs as a non-root, read-only-rootfs container. OPENROUTER_BASE_URL is config, so pointing Roger at a local inference host is an env change rather than a rewrite. That was tested and shelved on cost and hardware grounds, so hosted is the only supported setup today: see ADR-0009.

Configure

cp roger.env.example roger.env        # fill in tokens, owner/guild IDs, model chains

Each MODEL_* var is a comma-separated priority list (primary first, the rest are OpenRouter fallbacks). Every model in MODEL_ADMIN must support tool calling.

Deploy

CI/CD is pull-based: pushing to main runs the tests, builds the image, and publishes it to GHCR (ghcr.io/r055le/roger:main); the host polls that tag and redeploys itself. Secrets are injected at runtime by sops exec-env and never baked into the image. Full runbook (host bootstrap, age key, systemd timer) in deploy/.

Run it directly on any Docker host:

sops -e -i roger.env                                  # encrypt at rest (age key — see .sops.yaml)
mkdir -p data
sops exec-env roger.env 'docker compose up -d'        # pulls the published image

Observability

Roger exposes Prometheus metrics on :${METRICS_PORT}/metrics (default 9108; set METRICS_PORT=0 to disable). Event counters — LLM requests, errors, and budget rejections — are incremented in process; state gauges — token/dollar spend, caps, feed count, and audit tallies — are refreshed from SQLite so they survive restarts. Key series:

Metric	Type	Labels
roger_tokens_today / roger_tokens_cap	gauge	brain
roger_cost_usd_today / roger_cost_usd_cap	gauge	brain
roger_llm_requests_total / roger_llm_errors_total	counter	brain (type)
roger_llm_budget_exceeded_total	counter	brain, reason
roger_audit_events	gauge	tool, status
roger_feeds, roger_build_info	gauge	— (version)

A ready-to-merge Prometheus scrape job and an importable Grafana dashboard live in deploy/observability/ — the bridge to the sre-observability-lab.

Development

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest
ruff check .

Status

Feature-complete across the planned phases:

• Admin — owner-gated via /roger, DM, or @mention, with short per-channel conversation memory; a hand-rolled tool loop with list_structure, create_channel, create_role, confirm-gated set_permissions / edit_channel / post_message / move_channel, and feed curation (suggest_feeds, add_feed, remove_feed, list_feeds); per-request tool and daily token budgets; a full SQLite audit trail.
• Ambient — deadpan chat via /chat or any non-owner @mention/DM, rate-limited per user + globally, with a short own-thread memory. No tools, ever.
• Digest — a scheduled daily RSS/Atom summary (also triggerable via /roger run the digest now), deduped so nothing posts twice. Roger curates its own feed list: DIGEST_FEEDS seeds it once, then Roger validates candidates against the live web and adds or drops them on request. A second, privately-curated feed list can also be DM'd to the owner only (PERSONAL_DIGEST_FEEDS), on its own schedule.

Runs as a non-root, read-only-rootfs container. ~275 tests cover the guard rules, the tool loop (including channel creation with access presets and the confirm-gated edit, post, and reorder tools), the rate limiter, and the digest and feed-curation paths.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.