jmrnilsson / aoc-watcher

An Advent of Code browser automation tool to avoid clicks and copy-paste.

🎁🎄 AoC 🤶 Watcher 🎄 🎁

Allows for an automated browser experience during Advent of Code subsmissions. Verified with Python interop and the current LTS NodeJS. If you prefer something else there are serveral other tools that could be worth a try. Examples are listed below. Built with Chrome Remote Interface and Javascript.

The following configurations have been verified or documented as unsupported.

OS	Browser	Verified
Windows	Firefox	✅ 2022-12-04
Windows	Brave	✅ 2022-12-04
MacOS	Firefox	❌ 2022-12-05: Firefox doesn't allow for Javascript injection.
MacOS	Brave	✅ 2022-12-22

⭐ Basic outline

• Awaits todays puzzle by long-polling the DOM. No additional HTTP requests.
• Navigates to puzzle once available.
• Downloads the puzzle input.
• Long-polls a process standard output and attempts a JSON extract.
• Prints any pending errors while coding.
• Submits and continues to part 2.
• Skips if a previous submission was correct.
• In-process prevention against duplicate submissions.
• Keeps track of bounds for failed submissions ("too high" or "low" answers), yet again in-process.

The browser will have to authenticate at some point. Might just do that in same browser that will run the debugger.

⭐ Tasks

Purpose	Browser	Comment
Install	npm i
Test	npm test	Runner provided by jasmine
Starting browser	./brave.ps1	firefox.ps1 and chrome.sh also available but may have to be modified to match path.
Running today	npm start	Requires a debuggable browser and enviroment variables (see below).
Running some other day	npm start "2018-02"	Requires a debuggable browser and enviroment variables (see below).

⭐ Notes on running

Some environment variables needs to be set. Here an example (on Windows) but you might just want to change the script used or use an env-file. Days will be padded with single digit zero fill (for now). On Windows I prefer to copy variables into a Powershell script.

# Kindly take note of employed Mustasche template string.
$env:AOCW_PUZZLE_FILE = 'puzzle.txt'
$env:AOCW_PUZZLE_FOLDER = 'C:\\development\\aoc\\year_{{year}}\\day_{{day}}\\'
$env:AOCW_MODULE = 'C:\\development\\aoc\\year_{{year}}\\day_{{day}}\\solve.py'
$env:AOCW_EXEC = 'C:\\development\\aoc\\.venv\\Scripts\\python.exe'

or in an .env:

AOCW_PUZZLE_FILE=puzzle.txt
AOCW_PUZZLE_FOLDER=M:\\development\\aoc\\year_{{year}}\\day_{{day}}\\
AOCW_MODULE=M:\\development\\aoc\\year_{{year}}\\day_{{day}}\\solve.py
AOCW_EXEC=M:\\development\\aoc\\.venv\\Scripts\\python.exe

⭐ Implementing support for puzzles answers

The watcher does interop via standard output from a user configured process. If the output contains a flat JSON dictionary with the word uzzle in the message it it's results will processed. It generally must also conform to the example below.

{
  "ok": true,
  "puzzle": 1475698
  "test": 42
}

⭐ Additional notes

Advent of Code is a puzzle oriented calendar by Eric Wastl and other contributors. Please consider supporting their work.

This repository is provided under MIT and isn't directly affiliated with Advent of Code, Firefox, Brave, Safari or Chrome. Any referenced libraries are licensed separately.

⭐ Other tools

These are examples of other Advent of Code tools for puzzle download or answer submission. I do not recommended or condone their use.

• https://github.com/scarvalhojr/aoc-cli
• https://github.com/wimglenn/advent-of-code-data
• https://github.com/gobanos/aoc-runner