This repository contains a number of utilities that I've written (and rewritten) over the years to help with GitHub Classroom.

I typically have an administrative repository, private to just the instructors, where I keep grades, slides, and other materials related to running my classroom. I'll copy these utilities to that directory and configure them to operate on the student repositories for just that class.

1. If you haven't already done this, you'll first need to pip3 install iso8601 pandas requests for necessary libraries. (Everything here requires Python3 and is tested with Python 3.7.1. Earlier versions of Python3 might or might not work.)

2. Copy all the py files here into your class administrative repository.

3. Get a GitHub token with all the "Repo" privileges. You do this on the GitHub website (instructions).

4. Edit the github_config.py file. In this file you can save values that every tool here will use. These parameters can be specified on the command-line for every tool here, but it's nice to save them so you're not typing them over and over again.

   • default_github_organization: Your organization's name (e.g., for https://github.com/RiceComp215-Fall2018, the organization name is RiceComp215-Fall2018).

   • default_github_token: Your API token goes here.

   • default_prefix: When you're cloning and otherwise working with a specific assignment for your students, you can specify this here.

   • default_grader_list: Used by github_graders, see below

   • default_grader_ignore_list: Used by github_graders, see below

All of these tools use a common library to interact with GitHub that tries to avoid rescanning student repositories unless something has changed. These scans can take a while to run and also burn through your available GitHub API request limit, so it's important to cache the results. (You'll see a multi-megabyte JSON file written out as a dot-file in the current directory.)

If you suspect the cache is out of date, that is, if you see student repos on GitHub that aren't being cloned or aren't being assigned to graders, then it's possible that there's a bug with our caching layer. The workaround is to remove the relevant dotfile (which has a name like .github-classroom-utils.RiceComp427-Spring2019.json), which forces a rescan of the students' repositories the next time you run one of the tools here. Please report this to dwallach@rice.edu so we can try to debug it.

Tool usage. Each tool below let's you run it with a --help argument which will summarize the command-line arguments.

You often want to get a local copy of every repo beginning with a common prefix, e.g., comp215-week06 for the week6 projects. Run python3 github_clone_all.py --prefix comp215-week06 --out codedump-week06 and it will create the directory codedump-week06 and will check out all of the matching repos into the desired directory.

If you keep running these tools, you'll eventually hit the wall with GitHub's rate limits. This tool tells you how many requests you have left and when the timer will reset.

If you checked the wrong box when setting up GitHub Classroom, and all your students' repositories are public, when you meant them to be private, you can go back into GitHub Classroom's settings and make sure that future cloned repositories will be private, but what about the existing ones? This tool will tell GitHub to make private all the matching repositories. (I've needed this twice in so many years, so I figure others might need this as well.)

If you're using GitHub Classroom, one of the things you may need to do is assign student submissions to graders. This project does this as a random mapping, printing a document that you might share with your graders on Piazza or whatever forum, with grader names and student project hyperlinks.

First, create a list of GitHub IDs that correspond to your graders and place that in the default_grader_list in github_config.py. This tells the tool who your graders are, and also any repos that they might have cloned for their own benefit will be ignored. If you want to ignore any other names, such as the professors, you can add them to default_grader_ignore_list.

Our graders need to know how to go from GitHub identifiers to our internal NetIDs, emails, and so forth. The tool will read in a CSV file with all this specified (by default, student-data.csv). To the extent anything is standard in the CSV universe, the first row should be a list of strings giving the names of each column. We use a GitHubID column for GitHub user ids, and then Name for their printable name, Email for their full university email address, and NetID for their university unique "network" identifier (which is often, but not always, their email address).

For group projects, github_graders still does the assignments at random, but it cannot print all this per-user information, since the user names aren't always in the project name. We make our students edit the README.md file to include this information.

Typical usage: python3 github_graders.py --prefix comp215-week06 will print out everything you need, assuming your assignment repos are named comp215-week06 with the students' names afterward.

The output of this tool is in Markdown format, which Piazza has recently added. Select the Markdown button before cutting-and-pasting. We post this on Piazza, visible only to the graders, and we ask the graders to edit the post to mark the students as "done" when they're done with their grading session. (This helps us see what graders haven't finished their work and, if necessary, assign other graders to pick up the slack.)

This program uses the GitHub "Events" API to print all of the push times for each commit, with its output in LaTeX "tabular" format. This might be useful if you have a student who you suspect of falsifying commit times around a deadline and you need to document what happened.

Lets say you want to get the commit times for a series of repos with names like assignment3-student1 and assignment3-student2, you run python3 github_event_times.py assignment3-student1 assignment3-student2 and it will print a table with the commit IDs (7 digit prefix, same as reported on GitHub's list of commits), the commit string, and the time at which that commit was pushed to GitHub, converted to your local timezone (from the UTC times reported by GitHub).

Note that GitHub only retains the underlying event data for a small amount of time, maybe three months. If you see something unusual, capture this output while it's still available.

• I did a talk at SIGCSE 2019 about an earlier version of these tools.

  • Slides
  • YouTube video

• For dealing with Travis-CI, check out travis-activate. (Travis-CI normally "activates" immediately when a new repository is created, but at least once I've seen this fail. This script was something I originally ran from a cron job to force all repos to "activate" with Travis, years ago, when Travis didn't know how to automatically activate new repos.)

• https://classroom.github.com/assistant - GitHub's web-based tool for bulk repo downloads (open source)

• https://github.com/dwalkes/github-classroom-scripts - knows how to set up pull requests

• https://github.com/ccannon94/github-classroom-utilties - knows how to clone assignments, add files, and to set things up for a run of MOSS

• https://github.com/osteele/multiclone - another repo cloning tool, written in Golang

• https://github.com/konzy/mass_clone - there are many forks of this, some with additional features