Advent of Code Template in Go

This is a template to put advent of code problems into a single executable. It allows you to measure the execution time of each part of each problem, and to ignore some of the boilerplate. Not sure if anyone else will be interested, but I thought I would give it a try because I have seen a lot of templates like this.

Instructions

To start a new day, download your input from the advent of code website and put it in a file named dayXX.txt where XX is replaced by the two digit day of the month within a subdirectory called inputs. Then, to generate code from a template using the command:

make start

It will default to adding code for the current day. This will create a directory called dayXXp1 where XX is replaced by the day number. Inside will be a file called solution.go with a Solve function in which to put your solution, and a solution_test.go file to write your tests. The Solve function takes an io.Reader argument which is the input and returns a solution which can be any type.

If you wish to start a problem for a specific day, say the 21st, you can create the desired directory from the template by using the make command to create the part 1 directory for that day using the command below.

make day21p1

To run the last code you worked on use the command:

make run

This will generate a run.go file and run the most recently modified code. Once the first part is finished you can start the second part by using the command:

make day21p2

This will copy your current part 1 code from day21p1 and update the package names. You can then edit that code to complete part 2.

You can run all the days with the command:

make runall

You can build a binary called aoc_run by using the

make build

command.

Finally, you can run your tests with the command:

make test