hopper

A git-like CLI for tutors on the hopper platform. It wraps git and the hopper orchestration services to safely pull, grade, and push all of a tutor's assigned student repositories.

Installation

Install via pipx or pip, or grab a prebuilt binary from the Forgejo releases page. Do not install via go install or build from source unless you are developing hopper — see Development for why.

pipx (recommended, installs an isolated executable):

pipx install hopper-cli

or with pip:

pip install hopper-cli

To upgrade later:

pipx upgrade hopper-cli    # or: pip install --upgrade hopper-cli

Prebuilt binaries

Prebuilt binaries for recent releases are available on the Forgejo releases page.

Requirements

• git — hopper drives git under the hood
• Python 3.8+ (only for the pip/pipx installation)
• An account as tutor/staff/admin on a hopper instance

Getting started

hopper auth            # set up an instance profile + API key
hopper init <course>   # create a workspace directory bound to a course
cd <course-uid>
hopper pull            # clone/update all your assigned student repos

Concepts

Profiles

A profile is a set of service URLs plus your API key — typically one per university. They live in the global config at os.UserConfigDir()/hopper/config.yaml (~/.config/hopper/ on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/hopper/ on macOS, %AppData%\hopper\ on Windows).

hopper auth interactively creates a profile, offering known presets (e.g. alu for Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) or custom URLs. You can hold several profiles and pick which one a workspace uses at init time.

Workspaces

hopper init [profile/]<course> creates a ./<course-uid>/ directory with a .hopper.yaml inside. <course> may be a UID (2025WS-EidP) or numeric ID. With multiple profiles, prefix the profile: hopper init alu/2025WS-EidP. All commands run inside that directory and never write outside it.

Commands

Run hopper <command> --help for the full flag reference of each command.

auth

hopper auth            # interactive setup (preset picker or custom URLs)
hopper auth --custom   # skip the preset picker and enter custom URLs
hopper auth list       # list configured profiles
hopper auth status     # show the current authentication state
hopper auth remove alu # remove a profile

Authorization happens in your browser: hopper opens the instance's authorize page and receives the new API key via a local callback. If that fails, it falls back to asking you to paste a key manually.

init

hopper init 2025WS-EidP    # uses the only/default configured profile
hopper init alu/2025WS-EidP
hopper init alu/42         # numeric course ID also works
hopper init --force alu/2025WS-EidP   # overwrite an existing .hopper.yaml

pull

hopper pull                 # sync all assigned student repos
hopper pull --student alice # pull a single student by username
hopper pull --only a,b,c    # pull only the listed usernames
hopper pull --prune         # remove local repos of students no longer assigned
hopper pull -j 8            # 8 concurrent git operations (default 4)

• --prune removes local repos of students no longer assigned to you, after showing a preview and asking for confirmation; --no-prune skips pruning.
• Per-repo failures are reported and skipped — one bad repo does not abort the whole run.

push / commit

hopper push                     # commit */README.md changes and push (default msg: "Grade exercises")
hopper push "Grade exercise 3"  # custom commit message
hopper push --all               # stage all changes, not just */README.md
hopper push --allow-invalid     # push even when the README point schema is invalid
hopper commit "WIP grading"     # commit without pushing (recovery path)

Before pushing, hopper validates that each modified README's first line contains exactly one point schema like (12/15). Invalid pushes are blocked unless --allow-invalid is given. A conflicting rebase surfaces the conflict and halts that repo instead of destroying local work — hopper never runs git reset --hard.

status / students / info

hopper status    # table: student, branch, ahead/behind, dirty/clean
hopper students  # table: username, name, matrikel
hopper info      # course name/uid/id, profile, your user and role, exercises

Version gate

On every command that touches the server (everything except auth, version, and help), hopper asks the active profile's orchestration server for the minimum supported CLI version:

• running version < minimum → the CLI refuses to run and tells you to upgrade;
• running version >= minimum → proceeds;
• server unreachable → proceeds silently (can't check offline).

License

Licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.

Development

Requires Go (see go.mod for the minimum version) and Task.

⚠️ Note: Building from source without injecting the version via ldflags produces a binary with a wrong/fallback version string (v0.1.0 or dev). This breaks hopper version, the CLI's self-upgrade check, and the server-side minimum-version gate. End users should install via pipx/pip or the prebuilt release binaries instead — see Installation. If you do build from source, always inject the version as shown below.

A plain go install works for quick local experiments only:

go install codeberg.org/hopper/cli/cmd/hopper@latest

Or clone the repository and build with Task (task build below produces bin/hopper). Useful tasks:

task build       # build the CLI binary to bin/hopper
task test        # run unit tests
task lint        # run golangci-lint
task fmt         # format Go code and imports
task default     # fmt, lint, vet, test, build
task ci          # strict CI gate: fmt, lint, vet, test, build, clean tree
task hooks:install  # point git at the versioned githooks directory

The version is injected at build time via ldflags:

go build -ldflags "-X codeberg.org/hopper/cli/internal/cmd.Version=vX.Y.Z" -o hopper ./cmd/hopper/