If it's just about doing it on your own computer, the easiest solution may be keyboard / gamepad mapping software. The idea is that you run a software in the background and it can make your program think that when you pressed a gamepad button that a keyboard button was pressed.
That said, I created a gamepad example for the pervious Leadwerks but it works with DirectInput so it will only work with Windows, I believe. If you can't download that, look here for the original code I reused. I think someone else created one for Xbox controllers only too.