ContestBot

A contest bot created during Hack On Hills 2019 at NIT Hamirpur.

Working video can be viewed here.

Problem Solution

This bot aims to make the life of competitive programmers easy. This bot helps in reminding programmers about programming contests held on various platforms like codechef, hackerearth and codeforces and the users can also command the bot to set reminders about any contest they wish to participate in.

Technologies Used

• Python
• BeautifulSoup and Selenium (for webscraping)
• Celery (for asynchronous task queue/job queue)
• Zulip API
• FB Messenger API

How to run

1. Clone this repo.
2. cd into the repo.
3. Create a virtual environment and cd into it

   python3 -m venv hack
   source hack/bin/activate
   

4. Install all requirements

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Run the command

   python3 multipro.py
   

6. In another terminal, run the command

   celery -A celery_tasks worker -l info
   

7. Join the zulip org here and private message to @ContestBot with the commands given below to get the desired info.
8. Create a fb page and an ngrok server and enter the ngrok address at messenger api settings, also enter the messenger api key to messenger.py file, then PM the fb page created with the commands given below to get the desired info.

Commands

1. Show all upcoming contests

    show all
   

2. Show codeforces contests

   show cf/codeforces
   

3. Show hackerearth contests

   show he/hackerearth
   

4. Show codechef contests

    show cc/codechef
   

5. Set Reminder after a query for some index number

   set reminder for index_number
   

What can it do?

ContestBot can do a variety of things related to online competitive programming contests and make the life of coders easy. Some of them are-

• Lookup contests on various websites and provide it to the user.
• Show time remaining for all the contests, listed platform-wise.
• Users can set reminders for any contest they wish to participate in.

How does it work?

• ContestBot runs a web-scraping job (scrapper.py) every 6 hours, to fetch contest related details from platforms like Codechef, Hackerearth and Codeforces and then stores it in the backend. This is done using Selenium (for dynamic pages like Codeforces) and BeautifulSoup (for static pages like Codechef).
• The main process (process.py) runs on the server and listens to responses from Zulip/ FB Messenger, then DialogFlow processes the message to get the relevant response, which contains the contest info from the backend.

How to contribute?

Clone the repo and feel free to send any Pull Requests that you feel to be contructive.