Apparate

Apparate is a command line tool to synchronize your HackerRank Accepted Submissions to your GitHub Repository. Just write apparate on terminal, give it your credentials, sit-back and relax, it'll take care of the rest.

You can also schedule a cron job to run apparate regularly & keep your submissions up to date.

Usage: apparate [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --repo TEXT    Name of GitHub repository to store submissions
  --user TEXT    Username of your HackerRank account
  --passwd TEXT  Login Password of your HackerRank account
  --token TEXT   GitHub Access Token with all repository privileges
  --help         Show this message and exit.

Setup Instructions

It's built with Python Selenium and uses Firefox binary for fetching data from HackerRank. It used GitHub REST API v3 to manage submissions repository. Here are the instructions to install apparate on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Other platforms may have similar requirements. Feel free to skip any steps which your system already satisfies accordingly.

Steps:

• Environment Setup

  • Update and Upgrade your OS
  • Install Firefox Geckodriver
  • Install Firefox Browser
  • Install Python3 and Pip3

• Apparate Setup

  • Download and Install Apparate
  • Validate and Test Installation

[Optional] : You may also want to schedule a cron job to run Apparate regularly. For that, follow these instructions,

• Scheduling cron Job to update regularly

  • Change to your Local Timezone (required for remote deployment, ex- AWS EC2 Instance)
  • Schedule Cron Job

Contributions

Contributions are welcome to apparate to add support for more platforms (ex- Codefchef, Codeforces etc.), improve existing code, update documentation or add new features. To start contributing fork this repository, make changes and send a pull request with your changes.

Update and Upgrade your OS

To update and upgrade your system, run the following command,

                               sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Install Firefox Geckodriver

Firefox geckodriver required for selenium,

1. Go to the geckodriver releases page. Find the latest version of the driver for your platform (32 bit/ 64 bit) and download it. For example:

   wget https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases/download/v0.20.1/geckodriver-v0.20.1-linux64.tar.gz
   

2. Extract the file with:

   tar -xvzf geckodriver*
   

3. Make it executable:

   chmod +x geckodriver
   

4. Add the driver to your PATH so selenium can find it: add export PATH=$PATH:/path-to-extracted-file/geckodriver to your ~/.profile and then execute source ~/.profile

Test it by re-opening terminal & executing geckodriver from another directory. If that doesn't works, perform step 4 again with ~/.bashrc file instead of ~/.profile.

Install Firefox Browser

Follow these instructions to install firefox [install Firefox 59.0.2 to avoid any compatibility issues]

1. Download Firefox v59.0.2 from Mozilla FTP using wget, example, for 64 bit systems

   wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/59.0.2/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-59.0.2.tar.bz2
   

2. Extract the tar package

   tar -xjf firefox-59.0.2.tar.bz2
   

3. Move the Firefox folder to opt & remove the Older version of Firefox if it's there

   sudo rm -rf /opt/firefox58 (only if firefox58 is already installed)
   
   sudo mv firefox /opt/firefox59
   

4. Create the symbolic link for new Firefox

   sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefoxold (only if any other version of firefox is already installed)
   
   sudo ln -s /opt/firefox59/firefox-bin /usr/bin/firefox
   

Verify installation by running firefox --version, if it throws any errors, then also install these required dependencies,

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3.0
sudo apt-get install xvfb 

Install Python3 and Pip3

Python3: It is already installed on new versions of Ubuntu, if not it's easy to install using apt-get

pip3: Install it using apt as sudo apt-get install python3-pip

Download and Install Apparate

1. Clone or Download Apparate Repository

    git clone https://github.com/sanketgautam/Apparate.git
   

2. Now install Apparate by executing following command inside Apparate/ directory

     pip3 install --editable . (installing setup.py)
   

Validate and Test Installation

To verify the installation, execute

    apparate --help

it should give the following output,

Usage: apparate [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --repo TEXT    Name of GitHub repository to store submissions
  --user TEXT    Username of your HackerRank account
  --passwd TEXT  Login Password of you HackerRank account
  --token TEXT   GitHub Access Token with all repository privileges
  --help         Show this message and exit.
  

Run and Test Apparate as follows.

apparate --repo <Submissions_Repo_Name> --user <HackerRank_Username> --passwd <HackerRank_Password> --token <GitHub_Token> 

Change to your Local Timezone

Most of the cloud virtual machine instances (ex- AWS EC2) use UTC by default. Before scheduling apparate with crontab, verify if your machine is using correct timezone, if not, then change timezone of your machine to your local timezone.

For that, may use timedatectl as,

1. To list all available timezones use timedatectl list-timezones

2. To set timezone use sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Kolkata

For example, to set machine timezone to Asia/Kolkata, you may run,

        sudo timedatectl set-timezone Asia/Kolkata

Note: To get cron to launch programs according to local time, I had to change /etc/localtime to be a symbolic link to the appropriate tzfile for my timezone, and then restart the cron service:

mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak
ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Kolkata /etc/localtime
service cron restart

Schedule Cron Job

To schedule a cron job, you can write cron expressions.To learn more about cron jobs & scheduling follow this nice article by DigitalOcean - How To Use Cron To Automate Tasks On a VPS

To add a contjob crontab -e and write down your schedule expression & and the file. Also make sure to add PATH variable to your crontab file, so that apparate & geckodriver can be found. You can list all the scheduled crontabs of a user by crontab -l

Example cron file for apparate (to execute it daily at 4 AM):

# setting shell and path for execution 
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/opt/

# apparte cron expression
0 4 * * * apparte --repo "Submissions_Repository_Name" --user "Your_HackerRank_Username" --passwd "Your_HackerRank_Password" --token "GitHub_Token" >> ~/cron_apparate.log 2>&1

Above given example cron jobs saves command logs to cron_apparate.log in users home directory.