canvascli

canvascli

canvascli downloads grades from Canvas, converts them into the format required for final submission to the FSC at UBC, and creates a few helpful visualizations.

Installation

canvascli requires a recent version of Python and its package manager pip. After installing those (e.g. via miniconda), you can run this command from your terminal.

python -m pip install -U canvascli

Usage

All canvascli functionality requires that you have created an Canvas API access token, so do that first if you don't have one already.

When running canvascli, you can either paste your Canvas token when prompted at the command line (ideally using a password manager, e.g. KeePassXC), or store it in an environment variable named CANVAS_PAT.

Typing canvascli at the command prompt will show the general help message including the available sub-commands. The most common use case is probably to prepare final grades for FSC submission, which you can do like so:

canvascli prepare-fsc-grades --course-id 53665

This will save a CSV file in the current directory which can be uploaded to the FSC. The file should automatically be correctly formatted, but it is a good idea to double check in case there are unexpected changes to how UBC inputs course info on Canvas.

canvascli drops students without a grade by default, and creates a few helpful visualizations of the final grades and assignment scores. Run canvascli prepare-fsc-grades --help to view all available options.

If you don't know the Canvas course id of your course, canvascli can check for you:

canvascli show-courses

This will output a table with all the courses your API token has access to. Run canvascli show-courses --help to view all available options.

Shell completion (optional, click to expand)

If you want suggestions for subcommands and option flags when you press TAB you can download the corresponding completion file from the GitHub repository and source it in your terminal's configuration file. If you don't want to do this manually, you can run one of the following commands (don't forget to restart your shell afterwards).

Zsh

First make sure that your zsh general shell completion enabled by adding autoload -Uz compinit && compinit to your .zshrc; it is important that this line is added before running the command below.

curl -Ss https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joelostblom/canvascli/main/canvascli-complete.zsh > ~/.canvascli-complete.zsh && echo ". ~/.canvascli-complete.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc

Bash

Bash shell completion requires bash >= 4.0 (notably macOS ships with 3.x so use zsh instead). If you are using GitBash for Windows, change .bashrc to .bash_profile in the command below, and note that you will only get shell completion after typing cavascli, not canvascli.exe.

curl -Ss https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joelostblom/canvascli/main/canvascli-complete.bash > ~/.canvascli-complete.bash && echo ". ~/.canvascli-complete.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Questions and contributing

Questions and contributions are welcome! The best way to get in touch is to open a new issue or discussion. Remember to follow the Code of Conduct when you participate in this project.