jacobat / advent_of_code_utils

Elixir utilities for Advent of Code

Advent of Code Utils

Input fetching and boilerplate generation for Advent of Code.

The goal of this project is to eliminate most of the manual labor involved with working on the yearly Advent of Code challenges.

As a sample, this is the workflow you'd use when working on the challenge of the first of December 2020:

$ mix aoc
* Creating: lib/2020/1.ex
* Creating: input/2020_1.txt
* Creating: input/2020_1_example.txt
Today's challenge can be found at: https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1

Afterwards, lib/2020/1.ex will look as follows:

import AOC

aoc 2020, 1 do
  def p1 do
  end

  def p2 do
  end
end

In this generated module, you can access the contents of the fetched input by using input_path/0, input_string/0 or input_stream/0. Example input is available through example_path/0, example_string/0 or example_stream/0. While solving your challenge, you can use the AOC.IEx.p1/0 and AOC.IEx.p2/0 helpers in iex to quickly test your solution so far. These helpers can also be set up to automatically recompile your mix project.

All of this is configurable so that you can adjust this project to fit your own workflow. Check out the docs for more information!

Installation & Use

• Add advent_of_code_utils to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:advent_of_code_utils, "~> 2.0"}
  ]
end

• Store your session cookie in config/config.exs. You can find this by inspecting your cookies after logging in to the advent of code website.

config :advent_of_code_utils, session: "<your cookie>"

• Use mix aoc to work on today's challenge. The day and year of a challenge can be passed in various ways, so this project can still be used when working on older challenges.

  • If you just want to use this application to fetch the input of a challenge, without generating any code, use mix aoc.get instead of mix aoc and ignore the following steps.

  • You probably want to add input/ to your .gitignore file if you use git.

• Add import AOC.IEx to your .iex.exs file. This allows you to use the utilities defined in AOC.IEx without specifying the module name. (optional)

• Set auto_compile? in your config/config.exs if you want the various AOC.p* to recompile your project (optional):

config :advent_of_code_utils, auto_compile?: true

Example Input

Besides fetching input, mix aoc.get and mix aoc will also fetch example input for the given day. This is done by reading the first code example on the challenge webpage, which is generally that day's example input.

Since this method is not 100% reliable, you may you wish to disable this behaviour. This can be done by passing the --no-example flag to mix aoc or mix aoc.get or by setting fetch_example to false in your config.exs file.

Issues

This project grew from a collection of utilities I wrote for myself when working on advent of code. I polished these utilities, but it is possible some bugs are still present. If you run into any issue, feel free to create an issue on GitHub.