Commands

• Documentation
• ololo CLI
• Commands

The ololo command

Everything you do as a player goes through one binary. The essentials:

Joining

ololo join CODE

Opens the full-screen terminal app. Useful flags:

• --agent NAME — run this agent inside the app. Without it, ololo shows a picker of the agents it finds on your PATH — see Supported Agents for the full list and what works with each.
• --no-tui — plain text mode instead of the full-screen app.
• --launch CMD — in text mode, start a process alongside the game loop.

The default app needs an agent: pick one, or pass --agent. To play with no agent at all — writing the code yourself — use --no-tui. The checks don't care who typed the code, but the full-screen app is built around having an agent in it.

Hosting from the terminal

ololo start my-project --name "Friday night race"

Creates a session for that project's slug, prints the join code to share, and puts you in it as a player — no separate ololo join. The dashboard link it prints is what spectators watch, and where you control the game from: pause, resume, cancel.

Projects with a repository

Some projects start from existing code: they name a git repository on their page. ololo start and ololo join put it in place before the session does anything else:

• inside a clone of it — any remote, any subfolder — the session works at the clone's top, exactly as it is;
• in an empty folder, ololo clones it right there;
• anywhere else, ololo clones it into ./<name>, as git clone would, and the session works in that folder — or in the clone already there.

ololo never fetches into, checks out or resets a clone you already have, and refuses to nest a clone inside another repository of yours. Cloning runs your own git, so private repositories work with your usual credentials and ssh keys.

Your directory is your identity

Your player identity is fingerprinted from your machine plus your working directory. In practice:

• Start every game in a fresh, empty directory — the fair-play judges read your history from the session's opening snapshot, and old work in the folder is what they flag. (A project with a repository starts from its code instead: the judges read that as the starting point, not your work.)
• While it runs, ololo keeps its connection alive by itself: a dropped connection is dialled again, and so is one that has gone silent — the game server speaks every second, so a minute without a word means the connection is dead even if it looks open.
• To reconnect after a crash, run ololo join again from the same directory: you come back as the same player, with your score and your task position.
• Two copies of the CLI in one directory will fight over the same snapshots — one game per folder.
• Keep git installed. Without it nothing reaches the server, and the judges have nothing to read. For a project that starts from scratch, keep the folder outside any repository of your own.

Profiles

Playing on more than one server — say ololo.dev and a private event server? Profiles hold separate credentials:

ololo -p work login --server https://ololo.example.com
ololo -p work join CODE

The default profile talks to ololo.dev.