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https://github.com/danwallach/github-classroom-utils

Python tools for instructors working with GitHub Classroom
https://github.com/danwallach/github-classroom-utils

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Python tools for instructors working with GitHub Classroom

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README 

          
# GitHub Classroom Utils



This repository contains a number of utilities that I've written (and rewritten)

over the years to help with [GitHub Classroom](https://classroom.github.com). 

Most recently (Oct 2019), I revamped the code to launch multiple, concurrent requests

to the GitHub servers whenever possible. These tools now run *significantly* faster.



## Setup



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.



## Installation & Configuration



1) If you haven't already done this, you'll first need to `pip3 install

iso8601 pandas matplotlib requests aiohttp` for necessary libraries.

(Everything here requires Python3 and is tested with Python 3.7.2.

 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)](https://github.com/blog/1509-personal-api-tokens). 



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](#github_graders)

   

   - `default_grader_ignore_list`: [Used by github_graders, see below](#github_graders)



   - `default_timezone`: [used by github_completion_times, see below](#github_completion_times)

     

      

## Tools



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.)



The cache uses the 

[ETag headers](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ETag)

generated by GitHub to try to avoid repeated downloads of identical lists

of all the student repositories. 

[GitHub's implementation of ETag](https://developer.github.com/v3/#conditional-requests) 

seems to be unreliable, so you'll be wanting to manually delete the cache

if you know that your students have created new repositories. You

do this by removing the cache file, which has a name like

`.github-classroom-utils.RiceComp427-Spring2019.json`).

This forces a rescan of the students' repositories the next time

you run one of the tools here.



**Tool usage.** Each tool below let's you run it with a `--help` argument which will summarize

the command-line arguments. 



### github_clone_all



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.



An optional flag, `--safe`, creates repositories that do not have your

API token embedded in them. This means that remote Git actions that

require the token might not work, but the repos are safer to share.

By default, the API token is embedded in the cloned Git repos.



### github_rate_limit



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.



### github_private_all



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.)



### github_no_partners



You tell the students that they're required to have a partner, or to have

a minimum group size. How do you detect the missing students? This script

does all that. It scans all the projects, extracts the teams, and lets

you know about any project with fewer than the minimum number of members.

Likewise, if there are students in your database who aren't attached to

any GitHub projects, you get their information as well.



### github_graders



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).



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. 



A new feature, `--teams` is useful when students are working as teams

with GitHub Classroom. This will use GitHub's APIs to identify the

names of each student associated with each repo and will adjust its

printed output appropriately. *We also have our students write their

team information into their `README.md` files, which is a helpful

backstop in case the GitHub metadata is incorrect.*



Another new feature, `--ignore` lets you specify a substring of a repo

name to ignore when assigning grading. We tell our graders, when they

want to check out a repo to play with it, to add the word `STAFF` in

the name. This helps us skip those so they don't get assigned to be

graded.



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.)



### github_event_times



This program uses the GitHub "Events" API to print all of the *push* times

for each commit. 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. By default,

you get a LaTeX "table" with a "tabular" inside. If the table is

too large, you've got two useful flags, `--longtable` and `--tiny`.

The former uses the LaTeX longtable package for multi-page tables.

The latter uses a smaller font.



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.



### github_completion_times



This reads all the available

CI data for every commit in every repo

and produces a plot over time of how many students have passed all

the tests and gotten a green checkmark. Here's an example from my

own students, showing work in progress toward a deadline on 2019-09-01;

you can see roughly 100 of 170 students have completed the work on

the evening of 2019-08-30. 



![Example completion graph](example_completion.png)



The timezone used to render the chart is set from the

`default_timezone` setting in `github_config.py`.



### github_invite_to_org

This will read a specified JSON file (`--file` parameter) to a GitHub organization (either the default in `github_config.py` or through the `--org` parameter) and invite the users specified in the file to the specified organization under the role associated with the user in the file.  



The JSON file should define a dictionary (mapping) of `{role: [username,...]}` where `role` is designated role of the usernames in the associated list.   `role` is restricted to `member` or `admin` (owner).  Multiple roles can be specified in the dictionary but do not specify the same username for multiple roles as which role they will actually be assigned is ill-defined.



The role to which each username is being invited will be printed as well as the response from GitHub showing the status of that request.



The resultant printout is in the format of a series of JSON dictionaries.



### github_org_teams

This will print out information about the teams in a GitHub organization (either the default in `github_config.py` or through the `--org` parameter). 



Note: The team name "slug" is included in the printout.



The resultant printout is in a JSON dictionary format.



### github_team_members

This will print out the members of a specified team (`--team` parameter) a GitHub organization (either the default in `github_config.py` or through the `--org` parameter). 



Note: The team name must be the team name `slug`.   This is the part of the GitHub URL that specifies team when browsing to the team on the web.   Typically, the slug is the team name with spaces replaced with dashes and no capital letters.



The resultant printout is in a JSON dictionary format.



### github_invite_to_team

This will read a specified JSON file (`--file` parameter) to a specified team (`--team` parameter) a GitHub organization (either the default in `github_config.py` or through the `--org` parameter) and invite the users specified in the file to the specified organization under the role associated with the user in the file.  



Note: The team name must be the team name `slug`.   This is the part of the GitHub URL that specifies team when browsing to the team on the web.   Typically, the slug is the team name with spaces replaced with dashes and no capital letters.



The JSON file should define a dictionary (mapping) of `{team: [username,...]}` where `team` is team to invite the associate list of usernames.   Multiple teams can be specified in the dictionary and any username can be invited to multiple teams.



The team to which each username is being invited will be printed as well as the response from GitHub showing the status of that request.



The resultant printout is in the format of a series of JSON dictionaries.



## See also



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

  - [Slides](https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/sigcse2019.pdf)

  - [YouTube video](https://youtu.be/xFPskG4ctsI?t=318)



- For dealing with Travis-CI, check out [travis-activate](https://github.com/danwallach/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/education/classroom-assistant/))



- 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://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/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



## Recent Updates

* (8/27/2021 by S. Wong) Added new functions to invite users to organizations and teams as well as to print out the teams in an organization and the members of a given team.