A package to help instructors work with GitHub Classroom
Project description
Classroom-tool
This package provides a script, classroom-tool
which is designed to work with
GitHub Classroom to automate some of the tasks
an instructor might have in marking work submitted on that platform.
The assumed workflow is that students undertake a GitHub classroom assignment, which they push to GitHub by a given date and time. The instructor(s) mark the work on a separate, private, GitHub repository. This repository contains one pull request per student, which enables the instructor(s) to mark the work by commenting on the pull request. The instructors' comments are returned to the students by creating PDFs of the annotated pull requests.
Installation
Install the package using:
$ pip install classroom-tool
GitHub personal access token
classroom-tool
will need to access GitHub in order to work, and to do so it
will need to be able to authenticate to GitHub. You will therefore need to set
up a GitHub personal access
token
with repo
permissions. Store the PAT in the GITHUB_PAT
environment variable
so that classroom-tool
can access it.
Setting up the GitHub assignment
When configuring the assignment on GitHub Classroom, ensure that you select
Enable feedack pull requests
. classroom-tool
will need these as the base
for the marking pull requests in the marking repository.
Configuration file
Configuration information which is constant for a particular marking exercise needs to be provided in a configuration file in ConfigParser format. A simple example follows.
[students]
roster = classroom_roster.csv
[github]
organization = my-org
basename = exam-2021
marking-repo = marking-exam-2021
[assignment]
deadline = 2021-05-26T12:00:00+01:00
students
This section contains information about the students taking the exercise.
roster
is a .csv
(comma-separated values) file with at least the following
columns. These are present in the roster you can download from GitHub classroom:
identifier
: The identifier of the student at your institution, such as a
student number or username.
github_username
: The GitHub username of the student.
Any other columns will be preserved in output. The following optional column has special meaning:
extra_time
: The additional time allowed to a student in minutes (for example
as a result of a disability). This can be blank for students with no additional
time.
github
This section contains the (non-sensitive) GitHub information about the assignment.
organization
: The name of the GitHub organization containing the classroom.
basename
: The GitHub classroom prefix for the current assignment.
marking-repo
: The name of the repository in which the marking branches and
pul requests will be created. This is in the same organization. The marking
repository should be an initially empty, private repository. Its name
should not start with basename
.
delay
: The number of seconds to wait between creating pull requests. Set or
increase this if you find you are hitting GitHub secondary rate limits when
running with the --pull-requests
option. Defaults to 10 seconds.
assignment
Information specific to this assignment.
deadline
: The submission deadline in iso 8601 time and data format.
Note that GitHub does not record push times, so this is the timestamp on the last commit which will be accepted.
classroom-tool usage
classroom-tool
assumes a sequential processing of the submissions, with
potential manual intervention at each stage to cater for anomolous inputs or
circumstances.
The basic usage is:
classroom-tool --config-file CONFIG_FILE
with CONFIG_FILE
replaced by the name of the configuration file. By itself,
this will do nothing. Actual processing is achieved by adding the options for
one or more of the following, stages. A help message is available by passing
--help
.
Fetching repositories
Passing --fetch
will fetch all the existant student branches from GitHub.
Creating local branches
Passing --create-branches
will create local branches with name
identifier-main
(or identifier-master
) and identifier-feedback
. Here,
identifier
is taken from the class roster in the configuration file, as
opposed to the GitHub username. If the identifier is anonymous (such as a
student number), this forms the first stage in anonymising the submissions.
Imposing the deadline
Passing --impose-deadline
will create local branches with names of the form
identifier-mark
. These branches will point to the last commit before the
deadline specified in the configuration file. In the current version of
classroom-tool
, extra time is not automatically accounted for at this stage:
you will need to manually move the branch pointer in these cases. For example
if student 123456 had additional time and you wish to mark their very last
commit rather than the last commit before the deadline, you would run:
git branch -f 123456-mark 123456-main
Creating a submission report
Passing --create-report
will create a csv
file with a name of the form
marking-repo-report.csv
containing all of the columns from the roster file,
plus the following:
commit_time
: The timestamp of the last commit on the student's main
(or
master
) branch.
late
: True if commit_time
is after the deadline. This field does take
into account extra time.
cloned
: True if the student accepted the assignment on GitHub.
submitted
: True if the student pushed at least one commit.
This report is indended to assist in identifying students who may have had technical or other issues.
Pushing to the marking repository.
Passing --push
will push all of the local, -main
, -master
, -feedback
,
and -mark
branches to the marking repository on GitHub.
Creating marking pull requests.
Passing --pull-requests
will create a pull request for each student in the
marking repository on GitHub. This pull request will compare the -mark
branch
with -feedback
. Creating pull requests is intentionally throttled to once per
three seconds in order to avoid triggering GitHub rate limits when working with
large classes.
Cutting down the GitHub spam
When running a big course, one can easily be overwhelmed by notifications from all of the classroom repositories. It is possible to unwatch everything manually, but that's too much clicking. This can be overcome with:
classroom-tool --unwatch
This unsubscribes the logged-in user from all repositories in the configured classroom that match the configured basename.
Anonymising the repository
Remapping the repository names to university identity numbers is not enough to anonymise the submissions, because every commit has author information.
Fortunately, git-filter-repo can fix this. The following code will anonymise all commits in the repository:
git-filter-repo --email-callback 'return b"anon@anon.eu"' --force --name-callback 'return b"Anonymous"'
Note that this action will rewrite all the commits in the repository. This means that none of the branches in the marking repository will share any history with the student repositories from which they were copied. This means that you probably only want to take this step once you are sure that all the other steps have been successfully completed. If you have already pushed the branches to GitHub then you will need to force push the anonymised branches:
classroom-tool --push --force
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