ghtt: Manage student projects and exams using GitHub

ghtt is a tool to help teachers run projects and exams on GitHub.

• Create individual or group repositories, issues and pull requests from templates.
• Grant and remove students access to individual or group repositories
• Download students solutions
• Integrate with Visual Studio Code to periodically submit solutions during exams.

It works both with GitHub.com and private GitHub Enterprise instances.

Installation

ghtt only runs on Linux and macOS, but Windows users can install WSL to run Ubuntu on Windows.

You can install ghtt by downloading the sources and installing it using pip.

git clone [email protected]:IBCNServices/ghtt.git
python3 -m pip install ./ghtt

After this, you can use it on your system!

Usage

Authentication

ghtt requires two forms of authentication.

• SSH keys are used to push and pull from and to repositories. For more information on how to set this up, see Adding a new SSH key to your GitHub account.

• To create issues and manage repositories, ghtt requires a second form of authentication. The easiest option for authentication is a GitHub Personal Access Token. You then need to supply this token to each command using the --token <token> flag.

  Alternatively, if you do not specify a token, ghtt will ask you for your username and password with each command.

Project configuration

Each project and exam you manage with ghtt needs a "project configuration directory". This directory contains configuration files and templates to use for that project or exam.

This repository includes a sample project config directory.

Note: this project-config folder includes a git submodule. Run git submodule update --init --recursive to download all submodules of this repository before you start.

• ghtt.yaml is the main config file for that project. It specifies which GitHub organization to use, the default configuration of the repositories and more.
• students.csv is a CSV file containing the students and (optionally) which groups they're in. The first row of this CSV is expected to contain the column headers. The next rows are the students.
• template/ is a GitHub repository that is used as the template for the student repositories.
• lab1-assignment.yaml is an issue template you can use to generate issues.

Each time you execute the ghtt command, it will look for the ghtt.yaml file in the current working directory. So make sure you cd to the project config directory before executing ghtt.

Common workflow

First, create a project folder based on the example included in this repo. Afterwards, create a new GitHub organization and modify ghtt.yaml to point to it. Now make sure you are in the project config folder. For ease of use, you can add the token as a Bash variable.

cd project-config
export TOKEN=AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Then you can use the create-repos command to generate the repositories based on the provided CSV of students.

# Create repositories for each student or group
python3 -m ghtt assignment --token $TOKEN create-repos

Students don't yet have access to these repositories. After you have checked if everything is correct, you can give the students access to the repositories using the grant command.

# Give all students access to their personal or group repository
python3 -m ghtt assignment --token $TOKEN grant

You can automatically create issues based on an assignment. You can use this to give students multiple assignments throughout the semester, for example.

# Create an issue in each repository based on the template.
ghtt assignment --token $TOKEN create-issues lab1-assignment.yaml

When the exam or a project finishes, you can remove the student's access using the remove-grant command.

# Remove access of all students
python3 -m ghtt assignment --token $TOKEN remove-grant

If you want to grade the solutions, you can download them all using the pull command. This will download the student repositories as branches in the template repository.

# Download all repositories to your local machine
# These will show up as branches in the template repository
python3 -m ghtt assignment --token $TOKEN pull

When the template repository contains all the student branches, you can turn these branches into folders using the following command.

# Turn all branches of the template repository to separate folders
# so each repository is now in its own folder in template.expanded/
ghtt util branches-to-folders template/