repobee-canvas

Repobee-canvas is a plugin for RepoBee to manage student git repositories using information from a Canvas assignment. With repobee-canvas, you can upload and submit a ZIP file of a student's repository to preserve their work in Canvas.

Repobee-canvas is still a work in progress. In its current state, repobee-canvas is more of a prototype.

Licence

Repobee-canvas is free software. Repobee-canvas is released under the EUPL 1.2 or later.

Usage

Install and setup RepoBee by following RepoBee's manual.

Configure repobee-canvas

1. Install the repobee-canvas plugin. In short:

   git clone https://github.com/htdebeer-tue/repobee-canvas
   repobee plugin install --local repobee-canvas
   repobee plugin activate --plugin-name canvas
   

2. Generate a Canvas API key via "Account", "Settings", "+ New Access Token".

3. Run

   repobee canvas init-course https://url.to/your/course
   

   This starts a wizard to configure RepoBee for use with your Canvas course. It creates a new directory and writes a RepoBee configuration file setup for use with your course. As part of the wizard you also have to select the fields for the Canvas-Git mapping table repobee-canvas uses to map between student accounts in Canvas and in Git.

Hereafter, change to this course's directory to run assignment-related commands, to setup student repos, and to clone student repos.

Create Canvas-Git mapping table separately

As part of the init-course command, the user generates a Canvas-Git mapping table CSV file unless there are no students. If you want to generate this mapping later, for example because more students have enrolled in your course by now, you can do the following steps:

1. Go to the directory created by init-course:

   cd course/dir/you/created
   

2. Run

   repobee canvas create-canvas-git-mapping
   

You can also generate a Canvas-Git mapping table CSV file outside a course directory. However, you either need to have configured Canvas access, or state the API URL, your access token, and the course ID via command-line arguments. You also need to specify the mapping table's filename via the argument --canvas-git-map. For example:

repobee canvas create-canvas-git-mapping \
  --canvas-access-token XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX \
  --canvas-base-url https://your.canv.as/api/v1/ \
  --canvas-course-id 34 \
  --canvas-git-map my_table.csv

This will create CSV file my_table.csv for course with ID = 34. The argument --canvas-git-map is optional, it defaults to canvas-git-map.csv.

Prepare and hand out the assignment

1. Prepare the assignment by running the command:

   repobee canvas prepare-assignment \
     --canvas-assignment-id XXX
   

   This command first checks that the Canvas assignment XXX allows file uploads. If so, the command sends a welcome message to all students participating in the assignment.

   To create a submission in Canvas for each student group participating in the assignment a message is send to each submission. Without this message, repobee-canvas cannot discover the students working in a group. However, this comment is immediately removed again, so you do not see it unless something is going wrong.

2. Generate the students file used by RepoBee. RepoBee uses the students file to create a GitHub team or GitLab suborganization for groups of students or individual student participating in an assignment, and then create a repository for this team or sub group.

   Run the command:

   repobee canvas create-students-file \
     --canvas-assignment-id XXX \
     --canvas-git-map YYY.csv \
     --canvas-students-file ZZZ.lst
   

   This creates the file "ZZZ.lst" containing the git IDs for the students participating in the assignment using the database "YYY.csv".

3. Generate the student repositories. Run command:

   repobee repos setup \
     --assignments AAA \
     --students-file ZZZ.lst \
     --canvas-assignment-id XXX \
     --canvas-git-map YYY.csv
   

Running the assignment

Use RepoBee standard functionality to run the assignment, like managing issues.

Note I do plan to integrate with Canvas peer-review functionality.

Finishing / Clone + Upload assignment

You can run repobe repos clone as usual. However, if you want to upload and submit a ZIP file of the cloned student repository to Canvas, use command-line parameters --canvas-upload-zip and --canvas-zip-name NAME. For example, run:

repobee repos clone \
  --assignments AAA \
  --students-file ZZZ.lst \
  --canvas-assignment-id XXX \
  --canvas-git-map YYY.csv \
  --canvas-upload-zip \
  --canvas-zip-name NNN

This will clone all student repositories, zip each of the cloned repositories, and upload and submit that ZIP file as "NNN.zip" to the Canvas assignment.

Note. I will write a complete manual later because the user interface is still in flux.