csync-canvas

rsync for Canvas

csync-canvas (or csync for short) is a node package to reguarly download and sync files uploaded through Canvas LMS by Instructure with your local filesystem. I got tired of manually downloading and updating the litany of files my classes hosted in canvas, so I wrote this instead.

After installing and configuring csync, simply by running csync-canvas (or by having cron regularly do so), you'll be able to place every course file for each course in a directory, gracefully handling modifications, conflicts, and deletion.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

To run csync, node version > 8.14 must be installed. Furthermore, while csync can work as a one off utility, it's designed to sync a directory regularly. As such, it is useful to have a cron-like service installed, but csync is agnostic as to which one.

Installing

To install csynv, run npm install -g csync-canvas. Csync requires a .csyncrc config file to be stored at ~/.csyncrc. This file should contain a json string with the following keys and sample values.

{
  "logFile": "~/.csync_logs",
  "canvasUrl": "https://canvas.harvard.edu",
  "accessToken": {{TOKEN}},
  "courses": {
    "30230": "~/data/cs121",
    "29128": "~/data/ES50",
    "30724": "~/data/Gov1510",
    "31265": "~/data/Ling83"
  }
}

csyncrc options

logFile

The location of the file which csync outputs logs and error logs. If not present, logs will be swallowed.

canvasUrl

The root url of the canvas website you access. Csync assumes the api is accesible at ${canvasUrl}/api/v1

accessToken

To use the canvas api you'll need to provide an accessToken giving csync access to your canvas account. To obtain a token, go to your canvas homepage and click on account on the sidebar on the left, then click settings (alternatively, simply navigate to ${canvasUrl}/profile/settings. Near the bottom of the page, click the "+ New Access Token" button. In the purpose field enter "csync", and leave the expiration field blank. Click Generate Token, and copy the token that appears in the token field (which should look something like 1842~OpPmQPcEzr7qWYeasd7343F5k2Y…). Paste this token in your .csyncrc file.

courses

The courses json object tells csync which courses to download files from (because canvas often lists inactive or prior courses in a user profile), and what directory to download such course files to. For each specified courseId, csync will create a folder (if it does not already exist) course files in the corresponding directory, and csync will make that folder an exact replica of the course files on canvas.

To obtain the courseId for a course, go to the canvas page for said course, and the ID can be found in the url, which should have format similar to https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/${courseId}

Running csync on schedule

After following these instructions, csync should be configured and ready to go. But if you don't want to have to manually type csync-canvas to keep your local course files in sync, you might want to configure csync to run on a schedule. This can be done with a number of utilities depending on platform, from cron to Mac's launchcd.

Csync is agnostic to such schedulers, but will happily work through one. Docs for launchcd can be found here, and a cron intro here.

Contributing

Csync targets node 8.14, compiled via babel.

Setup

$ git clone https://github.com/mfine15/csync
$ cd csync
$ npm i 

Then, csync can be run once with

$ npm run

Or can be rebuilt on change by running

$ npm watch 

This places all compiled node files into dist/, to be run with node dist/index.js.

Style

Csync style should conform to the .eslintrc, which is loosely based around eslint:recommended.

Authors

• Michael Fine

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Acknowledgments

• Hat tip to anyone whose code was used
• rsync, for enabling such derivative naming patterns
• Instructure, for creating an open and well documented API for their platform