Discord Protocol Buffers

Reverse-engineering Discord's user settings protobufs.

This repository provides protocol buffer files for Discord's user settings automatically generated and automatically updated. The protobufs are provided as .proto files in the out/ directory, one file per settings type.

These protobufs are used by the Discord clients for user settings.

Provided for educational purposes only.

Credits

• arHSM for originally reverse-engineering the technology behind Discord's protobuf implementation.

Usage

Note

Automating user accounts is against the Discord ToS. This repository is a proof of concept and I cannot recommend using it. Do so at your own risk.

Installation

# with npm
npm install discord-protos

# with yarn
yarn add discord-protos

# with pnpm
pnpm add discord-protos

# with pip
pip install discord-protos

Example

JavaScript:

const { PreloadedUserSettings } = require('discord-protos');

const encoded = PreloadedUserSettings.toBase64({
    status: {
        status: {
            value: "online",
        },
        customStatus: {
            text: "Hello World",
            emojiId: 0n,
            emojiName: "",
            expiresAtMs: 0n,
        },
    },
});

const decoded = PreloadedUserSettings.fromBase64(encoded);

console.log(encoded, decoded);

Python:

import base64
from discord_protos import PreloadedUserSettings

settings = PreloadedUserSettings()
encoded = base64.b64encode(settings.ParseDict({
    'status': {
        'status': {
            'value': 'online',
        },
        'custom_status': {
            'text': 'Hello World',
            'emoji_id': 0,
            'emoji_name': '',
            'expires_at_ms': 0,
        },
    },
}).SerializeToString())

decoded = PreloadedUserSettings.FromString(base64.b64decode(encoded))

print(encoded, decoded)

Mapping

The following table shows which protobuf user settings correspond to which .proto file (the Python package also provides a UserSettingsType enum for convenience).

| Type | Value | File | Use | | ---- | --------------------------------- | --------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | | 1 | PRELOADED_USER_SETTINGS | PreloadedUserSettings.proto | General Discord user settings. | | 2 | FRECENCY_AND_FAVORITES_SETTINGS | FrecencyUserSettings.proto | Frecency and favorites storage for various things. | | 3 | TEST_SETTINGS | - | Unknown. |

Protobufs

The .proto files can be compiled down to Python or JavaScript files by running npm run py or npm run js. This requires protoc to be installed.

Base64-encoded data for these protobufs are provided by the GET /users/@me/settings-proto/{type} endpoint. For preloaded user settings, base64-encoded data is provided in the user_settings_proto key of the READY event received in the Discord Gateway, as well as in USER_SETTINGS_PROTO_UPDATE events.

Development

Running pnpm load will extract and save the latest protobufs to the discord_protos/ directory.