canvascli 0.3.0

A CLI to reformat and review Canvas grades

canvascli

canvascli downloads grades from Canvas and converts them into the format required for final submission to the FSC at UBC.

Installation

canvascli can be installed via pip install git+https://github.com/joelostblom/canvascli (currently another package exists with this name on PyPI, so please install directly from GitHub instead for the time being).

Usage

All canvascli functionality requires that you have created an Canvas API access token, so do that first if you don't have one already. Typing canvascli at the command prompt will show the general help message with the available sub-commands:

Usage: canvascli [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  A CLI to reformat and review Canvas grades.

  Examples:
      # Download grades from canvas and convert them to FSC format
      canvascli prepare-fsc-grades --course-id 53665

      # Show courses accessible by the given API token
      canvascli show-courses

  See the --help for each subcommand for more options.

  If you don't want to be prompted for your Canvas API token, you can save it
  to an environmental variable named CANVAS_PAT.

Options:
  --version  Show the version and exit.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  prepare-fsc-grades       Prepare course grades for FSC submission.
  show-courses             Show courses accessible by the given API token.

Note that if you are using GitBash's default terminal on Windows, you will not be able to paste your Canvas API token and need to define the environmental variable instead.

The most common use case is probably to prepare final grades for FSC submission, which you can do like so:

canvascli prepare-fsc-grades --course-id 53665

This will save a CSV file in the current directory which can be uploaded to the FSC. This file should automatically be correctly formatted, but it is a good idea to double check in case there are unexpected changes to how UBC inputs course info on Canvas. canvascli drops students without a grade by default, and creates a simple visualization of the grade distribution. Run canvascli prepare-fsc-grades --help to view all available options.

If you don't know the Canvas id of your course, canvascli can check for you:

canvascli show-courses

This will output a table with all the courses your API token has access to. Run canvascli show-courses --help to view all available options.

Shell completion

You can set up shell completion for canvascli subcommands and options by saving the relevant completion file from the repo and sourcing it in your terminals configuration file. If you don't want to do this manually, you can run the following command (don't forget to restart your shell afterwards).

Zsh

First make sure that your zsh general shell completion enabled by adding autoload -Uz compinit && compinit to your .zshrc; it is important that this line is added before running the command below.

curl -Ss https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joelostblom/canvascli/main/canvascli-complete.zsh > ~/.canvascli-complete.zsh && echo ". ~/.canvascli-complete.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc

Bash

Bash shell completion requires bash >= 4.0 (notably macOS ships with 3.x so use zsh instead). If you are using GitBash for Windows, change .bashrc to .bash_profile in the command below, and note that you will only get shell completion after typing cavascli, not canvascli.exe.

curl -Ss https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joelostblom/canvascli/main/canvascli-complete.bash > ~/.canvascli-complete.bash && echo ". ~/.canvascli-complete.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Questions and contributing

Questions and contributions are welcome! The best way to get in touch is to open a new issue or discussion. Remember to follow the Code of conduct when you participate in this project.