Discord Bot Errors: Invalid Token, Intents, Lavalink

​

”LoginFailure: Improper token has been passed” / TokenInvalid

• discord.py: discord.errors.LoginFailure: Improper token has been passed.
• discord.js v14: Error [TokenInvalid]: An invalid token was provided.
• older discord.js: Error [TOKEN_INVALID]: An invalid token was provided.
• other libraries: an HTTP 401 Unauthorized on login.

• The token was regenerated or revoked in the Discord Developer Portal. Generating a new token instantly invalidates the old one everywhere it’s used.
• The token string has extra spaces or quotes copied in by accident.
• The code is reading the wrong environment variable, or the variable isn’t set on Square Cloud.

1. Go to the Developer Portal → your application → Bot → Reset Token.
2. Update the token in the application’s environment variables (dashboard Settings → Environment Variables, or squarecloud app env set). Never commit the token in a file that gets uploaded in the zip.
3. Double-check there are no stray spaces or quotes around the value.
4. Update the library (discord.js@latest or pip install -U discord.py).
5. Restart the application, so it loads the new value.

​

”Used disallowed intents” / Message Content Intent

1. Discord Developer Portal → your application → Bot → Privileged Gateway Intents → enable Message Content Intent.
2. Declare it in code as well:

// discord.js
const client = new Client({
  intents: [
    GatewayIntentBits.Guilds,
    GatewayIntentBits.GuildMessages,
    GatewayIntentBits.MessageContent,
  ],
});

# discord.py
intents = discord.Intents.default()
intents.message_content = True
client = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!", intents=intents)

3. Restart the application.

​

Lavalink connection closed with code 1006

1. Align your bot’s Lavalink client wrapper version with the Lavalink server’s major version (v3 client with v3 server, v4 client with v4 server).
2. On Square Cloud, the Lavalink server itself binds port 80, but your bot must connect to it through the edge on port 443 with secure: true.
3. Restart both the Lavalink application and the bot application after fixing the version mismatch.

​

Bot goes offline after working locally

• An unstable connection at the gateway level with no reconnect handling.
• Conflicting or incompatible dependency versions between what you tested locally and what’s in your dependencies file.
• The bot was stopped for going over its RAM or CPU, or for flooding the Discord API. In that case the logs show a [SQUARE-SHIELD] line and you get an email: see the status table.

1. Check the application’s logs in the dashboard first, they show the actual crash reason.
2. Add error handlers so a transient error doesn’t crash the process: process.on("unhandledRejection", ...) and client.on("error", ...) in discord.js, equivalent handling in discord.py.
3. Add AUTORESTART=true to your squarecloud.app so Square Cloud restarts the bot after a crash. It’s off by default, and it only restarts in the cases listed in AUTORESTART. It keeps the bot alive through transient errors, but it never fixes an invalid token, a syntax error or a missing dependency: those still need a fix in the code.
4. Watch for Discord API rate limits (429): the global limit is about 50 requests/second per bot token, with tighter per-route buckets (channel create/edit allows roughly 2 changes per 10 minutes per channel). Cache aggressively, use an async queue that respects the X-RateLimit-Remaining/X-RateLimit-Reset-After headers, and use webhooks for mass sends. A bot that keeps flooding Discord is stopped with ABUSE_REQUESTS.

​

Related guides

• Discord bot hosting tutorial: set up and deploy a bot from scratch.
• Environment variables: store the token outside your code.
• App won’t start: upload errors, missing modules and other boot failures.

​

Contact us