Ferris Elf

A discord bot that accepts code submissions, and benchmarks them in Docker containers.

Using the bot

This will change in future releases, but right now, the bot parses every message for leading keywords.

You DM the bot to submit a code segment. It replies back with the results of running the benchmark, be they compile errors or success. Your message MUST have a single file attached, and MUST be in the form 4 2, where the first number is the day number you're submitting for, and the second number is a 1 for Part 1, and a 2 for Part Two.

In a Discord Server, any message starting with "aoc" or "best" in any channel the bot is in will cause the bot to print the current leaderboard. You can use aoc 15 to check the leaderboard for Day 15, for example.

Running the bot

The guidelines for running the bot are a little different depending on your environment.

Dev

If you don't have poetry installed, I recommend you install it via pipx or asdf.

Put a secrets file in the root of your repository (see below), and run with poetry run python3 bot.py.

Inputs can be fetched via poetry run python3 fetch.py 4, where the 4 is an optional day argument that defaults to the current day.

The Secrets File

In the root of your clone of the repo, create a file named .secrets.toml. Copy these contents into it:

[discord]
owner_id = "01234567890123456789"
bot_token = "DiscorBotTokenGoesHere"

[aoc_auth.tokens]
token_1_name = "deadbeefaocsession1"
token_2_name ="deadbeefaocsession2"

The owner_id is the User ID of the person who can make changes to the bot's behavior. If you don't know who this is, it's you; pull Requests are always welcome. The bot will tell people to contact this User ID if there's a problem. So, if you're running the bot, your User ID goes in that spot. In Desktop Discord, enable Developer Mode from the settings, and then click your profile icon/username in the bottom-left to get the "Copy User ID" option.

The bot_token comes from Discord. You'll have to visit the Discord developer portal , create an application, then visit Settings > Bot , and click "Reset Token" button immediately below the bot's Username to get the token.

The aoc_auth.tokens are session cookies from Advent of Code's website. This setting is only used by the fetch script; you can skip this table if you don't intend to use the fetch script. You can add as many (or as few) tokens as you like. The name (left of the equals) will be used to name the input files when they're downloaded, and the value is the session cookie's value itself.

Production

We're still working on this. Our recommendation is a VM optimized for minimum interruptions. While this app is not Dockerized yet, it shouldn't be too hard to write up a Dockerfile for the app, assuming you can set up a Docker HTTP API or Docker-in-Docker. Using a container means you don't have to optimize the VM. Once you have the sandbox, make sure to put the following in order:

The only supported method of running the bot (for now) is via poetry. Install as per the dev instructions.
Set up a dedicated user just for the bot, with a home directory (for rootless docker).
Make sure the bot has access to Rootless Docker. The bot will be running untrusted code in docker containers, so harden it.
Clone the repo into the bot user's home directory.
Edit the settings.toml and .secrets.toml files for your environment. These need to be in the same directory as the bot.py file.
We don't have any systemd files yet, so you'll have to write those yourself for now (pull requests welcome!).
Run the bot via poetry run python3 however is appropriate for your environment.

Note that data is stored in sqlite, so that does impact how you do backups.

Support

This bot is under active development. We cannot offer formal support at this time. If you're able to troubleshoot at a source code level, feel free to file issues if you can identify what's going on in the app code, or have detailed Steps to Reproduce that you can share in an issue.

We do welcome pull requests!