How to automatically gather or collect assignments?

geoffryan (Geoffrey Ryan) 2016-09-06 22:29:13 UTC #1

Hi all,

Once an assignment has been created and the due date has come up, is there any quick way of cloning all the submissions to my local machine? Preferably adding a tag to mark the commit that is being graded? I remember hearing about a tool, teachers_pet (?), that may have had this sort of functionality but I'm not sure if its still supported.

Thanks!

Best,

Geoff

Bunkermaster (Yann Le Scouarnec) 2016-09-07 00:13:19 UTC #2

https://github.com/education/teachers_pet

Looks like a match?

geoffryan (Geoffrey Ryan) 2016-09-07 02:57:21 UTC #3

It is, but I wasn't sure if its supported to work with Classroom, or what the recommended way of collecting assignments is.

BergProfJ (Berg Prof J) 2016-09-10 15:33:38 UTC #4

teachers_pet was created before GitHub Classroom came along, I believe...so it's unclear to me how to gather/collect work from student's individual copies of the assignment repository (i.e. the copies they made by "accepting" the assignment thru GitHub Classroom), since they are not necessarily in teams. I tried to use it to do so using the "clone_repos" command, including my organization name and the "prefix" for the assignment repository, but it errors out because there are no teams for each student.

kchappelow (Keith Chappelow) 2016-09-14 14:32:24 UTC #5

I was wondering the same thing. I've created a couple of windows batch files to clone and tag the student's repositories. I also created one that would do a pull from each since they sometimes turn things in late.

@echo off
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM     GitHub Classroom clone homework
REM 
REM		INSTRUCTIONS:
REM		1) Run this file specifying the homework name
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

setlocal
@echo 

if "x%1x" == "xx" goto displayUsage
set "CURRENT_DIR=%cd%"

git clone https://github.com/KVCC-Java/%1-student1.git
cd "%1-student1"
git tag -a grading -m "grading this version"
git push origin grading
cd "%CURRENT_DIR%"

git clone https://github.com/KVCC-Java/%1-student2.git
cd "%1-student2"
git tag -a grading -m "grading this version"
git push origin grading
cd "%CURRENT_DIR%"

goto end

:displayUsage
echo.
echo Usage: cloneHW [homework name]
pause
goto end

:end

@echo off
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM     GitHub Classroom pull homework
REM 
REM		INSTRUCTIONS:
REM		1) Run this file specifying the homework name
REM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

setlocal
@echo 

if "x%1x" == "xx" goto displayUsage

set "CURRENT_DIR=%cd%"

cd "%CURRENT_DIR%\%1-student1"
git pull
git tag -a grading -m "grading this version"
git push origin grading

cd "%CURRENT_DIR%\%1-student2"
git pull
git tag -a grading -m "grading this version"
git push origin grading

goto end

:displayUsage
echo.
echo Usage: pullHW [homework name]
pause
goto end

:end
cd "%CURRENT_DIR%"

geoffryan (Geoffrey Ryan) 2016-09-14 21:09:50 UTC #6

Thanks all!

Turns out there have been a few threads looking at this. Sounds like they're working on adding it as a feature to Classrooms, but its not there yet. I'm taking the route of @kchappelow, and writing a bash script to automate it in the meantime. Good opportunity to learn bash!

sdexter72 (Sdexter72) 2016-09-15 11:48:29 UTC #7

I feel compelled to add my voice to this thread. I've been using teachers_pet for a couple years with great success; I'm a huge fan. It seems like GitHub Classroom is a direct spinoff from that project, but Classroom has only 10% of the functionality. There's no way for me to break my 'classroom' into sections, there's no obvious way (as discussed on this thread) to do a mass clone for grading. I'm not sure why teachers_pet is advising people to move to Classroom at this time. For my next assignment, I'll be going back to teachers_pet—it takes a little more setup, in that the instructor has to provide a list of students' GitHub usernames, but there is ample documentation (unlike Classroom), and it does what you want it to do.

kchappelow (Keith Chappelow) 2016-09-19 13:23:14 UTC #8

I've converted these scripts to bash scripts:

#!/bin/bash
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#     GitHub Classroom clone homework
# 
#		INSTRUCTIONS:
#		1) Run this file specifying the homework name and optional tagname
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
   echo Usage: cloneHW [homework_name] [tagname]
   exit 1
fi
if [ -z "$2" ]
then
  tagname="grading"
else
  tagname="$2"
fi

currentdir=$(pwd)

git clone https://github.com/KVCC-Java/$1-student1.git
cd "$1-student1"
git tag -a $tagname -m "grading this version"
git push origin $tagname
cd "$currentdir"

git clone https://github.com/KVCC-Java/$1-student2.git
cd "$1-student2"
git tag -a $tagname -m "grading this version"
git push origin $tagname
cd "$currentdir"

#!/bin/bash
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#     GitHub Classroom pull homework
# 
#		INSTRUCTIONS:
#		1) Run this file specifying the homework name and tagname
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
   echo Usage: pullHW [homework_name] [tagname]
   exit 1
fi
if [ -z "$2" ]
then
  tagname="grading"
else
  tagname="$2"
fi

currentdir=$(pwd)

cd "$currentdir/$1-student1"
git pull
git tag -a $tagname -m "grading this version"
git push origin $tagname

cd "$currentdir/$1-student2"
git pull
git tag -a $tagname -m "grading this version"
git push origin $tagname

cd "$currentdir"

geoffryan (Geoffrey Ryan) 2016-09-20 07:56:57 UTC #9

I wrote a bash script to automate most of this! https://github.com/geoffryan/classroom-util

It's initial form was based on what @kchappelow posted above. Thanks!

The script has a few modes, and assumes there is a file students.txt that is a list of usernames to expect assignments from.
- "Collect" either clones/pulls (as appropriate) all submissions for a particular assignment
- "Grade" Loops through all repos in an assignment, finds the most recent commit before a given due date, tags it as "Graded" and makes a new grading branch at that commit.
- "Return" will loop through all repos, merge the grading branch into master, and push to origin.

The "Grade" will just a be file I add grade.txt with the score and comments, so automatically merging the grading branch back into master shouldn't be a problem I think.

Is this similar to how any of you have been using Classroom?

dhowe (Dhowe) 2016-09-21 07:36:19 UTC #10

I was hoping such things would be built in to classroom -- no such luck. But yes, this sounds like a good workflow...

PeterDaveHello (Peter Dave Hello) 2016-09-22 14:11:21 UTC #11

Agree, teachers_pet is good and useful, really hope GitHub can keep the development works their to make it much more powerful.

joeyfreund (Joey Freund) 2016-09-26 12:38:12 UTC #12

Warning: Shameless promotion ahead (-:

Allowing for various batch operations and flexible workflows is one of the main reasons why I built https://gitomator.github.io/

It's still in pre-alpha, but is already serving a few of us (at the University of Toronto) very well. Iwill be really happy to get more people to start using it (and, perhaps, even contributing changes).

rcraggs (Richard) 2016-09-26 20:27:13 UTC #13

Hi @joeyfreund that seems very interesting. I currently have a set of teachers_pet and travis scripts that do pretty much the same thing, but this may be tidier.

joeyfreund (Joey Freund) 2016-09-26 21:07:30 UTC #14

@rcraggs , thanks. I would love to have a few more people using it (right now, it's only myself and a few colleagues here at UofT) and be able to move from pre-alpha to alpha as soon as possible.

If you need any help using Gitomator, please let me know - Since the project is at such an early stage, you can expect the occasional bug here and there, but you also get to enjoy a highly personalized tech-support service

robwhess (Rob Hess) 2016-10-12 03:24:48 UTC #15

Since several folks have shared their scripts for downloading student assignments, I figured I'd share mine:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/robwhess/48547bf369ccf422cca78e5753b5a1c7

gh_classroom_collect.py

#!/user/bin/env python

#
# This is a simple python script to clone all of the repositories for an
# assignment managed via GitHub Classroom.  It has a dependency on the
# requests module, so to use it, you must:
#
#   pip install requests
#
# You can run the script with the '-h' option to get info on its usage.

This file has been truncated. show original

GitHub Classroom Desktop looks like it could be a great tool, but it also looks like development on it has stalled (no commits for more than a month). Anyone know the status of that project?

johndbritton (John Britton) 2016-10-25 02:46:23 UTC #16

We are still planning to release GitHub Classroom Desktop, but don't have an ETA right now.

hydrodog (Dov Kruger) 2017-01-19 05:38:43 UTC #17

I take it there is no automatic way to find out what repos start with homework1- ?
It's not the worst thing in the world to have to build a file with the students names, but I would rather not maintain that.

Is there any way to download all the repos for my organization? I can get it on screen:

Feature request! I want a REST API that returns a list of:

github.com/api/v1/getrepos?org=StevensDeptECE&prefix=CPE593HW

it would return some JSON like:
[
["CPE593HWinsertion-sort-student1", 20170118175803],
["CPE593HWinsertion-sort-student2", 20170118181015]
]

where the second number is a timestamp.
This way, we could just go for the ones that have changed.

robwhess (Rob Hess) 2017-01-23 08:04:09 UTC #18

@hydrodog, check out the get_repo_urls() function in my script above. It uses the GitHub API to get a list of all the repos in an organization, selects only the repos that start with a given prefix, and then gets the clone URLs for those repos. Sounds like that's close to what you want to do.

osteele (Oliver Steele) 2017-02-09 20:21:53 UTC #19

Also check out the download_repo_fork_files.py script in https://github.com/olin-computing/classroom-tools, documented here. Used as:

./scripts/download_repo_fork_files.py org_name/repo_name

it downloads forks of the given repository. As:

./scripts/download_repo_fork_files.py --classroom org_name/repo_name

it downloads repos username/repo_name-$login in the same account. (This is the schema used by GitHub Classroom.)

This script omits repos that belong to members of org_name, and it omits files that are unchanged between the source repo and the fork.

bramus (Bramus!) 2017-02-10 10:27:09 UTC #20

If the student projects have dependencies installed by a dependency manager such as Composer (PHP) or NPM (Node), then https://www.bram.us/2014/02/16/installing-dependencies-in-all-subfolder-organised-projects/ might come in handy. It's a one-liner to installing all dependencies for all (cloned) repos.