im-course-tools

The im command for the Instructing Machines course: a small, pure-Python CLI that students run from their course folder.

im check                 # is my environment working?
im get iteration         # download a chapter notebook
im get alignmentproject  # download a whole project
im get                   # everything on offer
im update                # refresh the environment from the website

Why it is a package

The course folder students download holds their own work and nothing else. The four commands used to be four Python files copied into that folder, which put code students had no reason to read next to the notebooks they did, and left no way to fix a bug for a hundred people already holding a copy. Here they travel with the environment instead: a fix reaches everyone through a release.

What the commands guarantee

Nothing ever overwrites a student's work.

• A notebook that already exists is left exactly as it is, and the fresh copy lands beside it as iteration-2.ipynb.
• A project that already exists stops the command. A project is a folder worked in for a week, and unpacking over it would put the empty starting file back on top of real code.
• A project zip is checked before it is unpacked: every entry must live inside the project's own folder, so an archive naming ../../somewhere writes nothing.
• im update downloads both pixi.toml and pixi.lock, checks each is what it claims to be, and keeps a .backup of the old one before writing.

Files land in the course folder, found by walking up from wherever the student happens to be, so im get works two subfolders deep.

Development

pixi run install-dev     # editable install into the pixi environment
pixi run test            # the test suite

The tests run against a fake course website on disk, reached through a file:// URL, so they never touch the real site. IM_COURSE_URL and IM_COURSE_FOLDER are the two overrides they use, and they work by hand too:

IM_COURSE_URL=file:///path/to/_book im get iteration

Release

pixi run release         # bump, tag, and push; CI builds the conda and pip packages

License

MIT