nekontrol - Control your kattis solutions

This is a simple program that compiles, runs and tests your kattis solutions against local and sample input and output.

Demo

Features

• Automatically downloads sample input and output
• Discovers local sample input and output
• Compiles your source code and runs it with local and sample input and output
• Ignores debug messages - ignores lines starting with "dbg" or "debug" and inline messages "(dbg...)" and "(debug...)". If debug lines are discovered then you are notified in the output so that you don't submit something that is incorrect.

The current supported languages are:

• C++ (requires c++ in your path)
• Rust (requirest rustc in your path)
• Python (requires python in your path)
• Haskell (requires ghc in your path)
• Lua (requires lua in your path)
• JavaScript (Node) (requires node in your path)

Note Nekontrol will try to find a way to run your program, but it is not guranteed that the program it uses matches the version that kattis has. For instance kattis runs python with pypy 3.8. Nekontrol will try to run it with pypy 3.8, but will fall back to other versions if it cannot be found.

Adding more languages is left as an exercise for the reader.

Usage

Simply run nk test <source file> and it should hopefully compile (if needed) and run!

• nk assumes that the name of the source files matches the name of the problem (found in the url, ex. https://open.kattis.com/problems/hello). If this assumption is incorrect, you can specify the problem with --problem <problem name>. Local files are still matched with the filename regardless of the problem specified.
• Input and output files should follow the format <filename>.in or <filename>.<number>.in and corresponding outputs are named <filename>.ans etc. where <filename> comes from nk <filename>.cpp for instance.

Note Multiple files are not supported as of yet

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer as well as pip.
• A half decent terminal. Almost anything other than cmd.exe on windows will work.

Install or update

To install or update, run the following.

pip install -U nekontrol

Now it should hopefully work, enjoy!

Arch

On Arch, normal pip install will fail with error: externally-managed-environment. You can either use python-pipx to setup a separate virtual environment, as recommended by the error message, or you can install the AUR package nekontrol-git which will use shared system packages.

Nix

There is a flake for Nix users, but if you use Nix I trust you know how to use flakes.

Other

• If you are thinking "nekontrol is a kinda weeby name", I ask you: have you ever tried coming up with an original name?