Introduction

Python script used to commit and push files to github classroom repos. Useful for instructors with automarkers to mass update student repos with results and feedback.

I made this script after I discovered github classroom lets you clone repos, but not push to them... Yikes! This is because they use temporary clone tokens by design.

The following error will come up when trying to push. remote: Temporary clone tokens are read-only. fatal: unable to access ‘https://github.com/UTSCCSCC01/great-project-123/ 7’: The requested URL returned error: 403

https://education.github.community/t/how-to-push-changes-to-student-repos/48751

Walkthrough

1. Download student submissions from github classroom
2. Unzip it, and move submissions to github_classroom_pusher/submissions
3. Look at the 'Before You Run' section, and change important env & user variables
4. Run the script, i.e.

python3 upload_github.py

5. Enter your commit message, or use the default one
6. The script should now be cloning directories from github_classroom_pusher/submissions to github_classroom_pusher/upload_to_github
7. The script should then git add, commit, and push to repos
8. If you've already cloned and pushed and want to push again, you will need to manually delete the folders from github_classroom_pusher/upload_to_github and based on what you want to do, change items_to_add in env.yml (possible improvement in future)

Before You Run

• change the following environment variables in env.yml
• python_dir: ensure this points to python3
• working_directory: this is the absolute root directory where the script and submissions are located
• github_organization_url: the fixed part of the URL where you want to clone repos from, see example in env.yml
• assignment_name: what you named the assignment plus an extra - to satisfy git repo naming conventions
• items_to_add: what you want to upload to the repo

Features

Update all repos

python3 upload_github.py

Update select repos from a .txt file

python3 upload_github.py -c custom.txt

• this option allows you to upload exclusively to submissions in custom.txt
• sample custom.txt file in repo, each line represents a student's submission folder
• may be useful for re-marks, where only a subsection of submissions needs to be changed

Other Stuff

• to find python directory run the comman 'which python' on commandline, then enter the location into python_dir', do not include trailing slash python_dir = '/usr/local/bin'