canvaslms: A CLI to Canvas LMS.

This program provides a command-line interface for Canvas. The command is canvaslms and it has several subcommands in the same style as Git. canvaslms provides output in a format useful for POSIX tools, this makes automating tasks much easier.

Getting started

Start by login to your Canvas server

canvaslms login

Let's consider how to grade students logging into the student-shell SSH server. We store the list of students' Canvas and KTH IDs in a file.

canvaslms users -c DD1301 -s | cut -f 1,2 > students.csv

Then we check who has logged into student-shell.

ssh student-shell.sys.kth.se last | cut -f 1 -d " " | sort | uniq \
  > logged-in.csv

Finally, we check who of our students logged in.

for s in $(cut -f 2 students.csv); do
  grep $s logged-in.csv && \

Finally, we can set their grade to P and add the comment "Well done!" in Canvas. We set the grades for the two assignments whose titles match the regular expression (Preparing the terminal|The terminal).

    canvaslms grade -c DD1301 -a "(Preparing the terminal|The terminal)" \
      -u $(grep $s students.csv | cut -f 1) \
      -g P -m "Well done!"
done

Installation

Just install the PyPI package:

python3 -m pip install canvaslms

Some subcommands use pandoc, so you will likely have to install pandoc on your system manually.

Development

This project uses literate programming with noweb. The source code is written in .nw files which combine documentation and code.

GitHub Copilot Setup

This repository includes GitHub Copilot configuration files:

• .github/copilot-instructions.md: Project context and coding guidelines
• .copilotignore: Files to exclude from Copilot context

The configuration helps Copilot understand the literate programming approach, Canvas LMS domain, and project-specific patterns.