GitHub Classroom

Table of Contents

• The workflow you use as a developer, scaled for the needs of students.
• Why try Classroom?
• Design principles
• GitHub Classroom and the edtech ecosystem
• The technical details
• Deployment
• Help wanted
• Contributors

The workflow you use as a developer, scaled for the needs of students.

Developers rarely work all by themselves, on a deadline, or ship something they’ll only use once (with no idea whether it actually works).

Wouldn’t students be better served by showing versions of their work, iterating, checking in on milestones and showing off the final product?

With GitHub Classroom you can set up the industry-standard workflow and free up your time to focus on teaching.

Classroom is a teacher-facing tool that uses the GitHub API to enable the GitHub workflow for education.

You create an Assignment with starter code and directions, send along one link, and students get their own “sandbox” copy of the repo to get started.

Set due dates, track assignments in your teacher dashboard, or integrate other tools like testing frameworks.

With Classroom, you can spin up your course on GitHub and move on to the good stuff.

@johndbritton, @mozzadrella, @d12, and @tarebyte, are all maintainers.

Why try Classroom?

Spend more time with students, less on setup. Students accept an assignment with one link, so you can get straight to the material.

Bootstrap group assignments in a snap. Invite students to a shared repository, and cap the number of students per group. Use the same groups over and over again, or create new ones.

More insight into student work than ever before. See when students accept the assignment, and access their work from the moment they start. With version control, catch when they get stuck and help them rewind.

You are in control. Students can work individually or in groups, in public or in private. Invite teaching assistants or graders to view the assignments.

Scales for large courses with ease. If you have a small course, Classroom will make your life easier and save you time. If you have hundreds of students, we have you covered: as many repositories as you need, and webhooks to integrate automated testing tools.

Works with your Learning Management System (LMS). Students submit a link to their assignment repository to your learning management system. Give feedback through comments in GitHub, but keep grades in your LMS.

You’re not alone. The experts on the GitHub Education team are here to answer any of your questions, and we’ve got docs, best practices, and a strong community of educators to help you migrate to Classroom.

Are you super-advanced? Do you want to build your own tools? We 💖 contributions. Please check out contributing guidelines.

Design principles

Classroom is a teacher-facing tool to simplify the educational use of GitHub. Every student needs feedback and support as they learn to code, and using GitHub you can give them the right advice, in the right place, at the right time. Classroom makes it easier to use the workflow you love, with some automation and ease for student use.

Students use GitHub. They don’t use Classroom. Experience with real-world tools gives students a leg-up once they move on from school. Invest time in the tools students can grow with, not another third-party tool with its own learning curve.

Classroom is not an LMS (Learning Management System). If you need to use an LMS like Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard, we hear you. Students can post their repositories to your LMS. We’re going to stick with what we’re good at, which is helping people collaborate on code.

Classroom is open source. Git and GitHub are versatile with many ways to meet your learning goals, and we want to model the open source process that makes our communities great.

We welcome contributions aligned with the roadmap below and through answering these questions:

• Does it enable the real-life experience of using GitHub as a developer?
• Does it replicate functionality that's best left to the expertise of content platforms, hardware or LMS?
• How many support tickets and questions will the feature address?

Who is Classroom for?

Anyone teaching computer science in a high school, university or informal environment. Folks who might also find Classroom useful:

• Higher ed statistics and data science teachers
• Higher ed biology and the hard sciences

GitHub Classroom and the edtech ecosystem

In case you’re wondering “How does Classroom interact with my favorite app/my notebook/my LMS” here’s the tl;dr on how those pieces fit together:

Apps and content platforms

Examples: Codecademy, Skillshare, Udemy, Udacity

Apps offer premium content and interactive exercises. GitHub Classroom offers real-world experience with code. Classroom, as a teacher-facing application will eventually surface best-in-class content for top courses (notes / lectures / problem sets) but not produce original content.

Learning Management system/LMS

Examples: Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas. Google Classroom

Teachers often use a learning management system in keeping with student privacy regulations. Classroom has a lightweight integration with LMS ecosystem--students can submit a link to their repositories. LTI compliance and Google Classroom integration will make the app more extensible.

Notebooks

Examples: BlueJ, Jupyter, RStudio

Most notebooks have a Git integration that students can push to. Future iterations may pre-populate repos with robust directions on set up.

Hardware

Examples: Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi, Lego

GitHub Classroom runs in Unix environments and Windows. Shared machines or lab environments are encouraged to use cloud-based environments, like Cloud 9. Integration looks like Git and GitHub pre-loaded + embedded in hardware.

Assessment

Examples: Pearson, Travis CI, Circle CI

For GitHub Classroom, assessment is directly related to the real-world experience of being a developer: your code passes tests. Configuring folders in student repositories is a priority on the roadmap.

The technical details

GitHub Classroom is a Ruby on Rails application.

New to Ruby? No worries! You can follow these instructions to install a local server.

Installing a Local Server

First things first, you'll need to install Ruby 2.4.0. We recommend using the excellent rbenv, and ruby-build

rbenv install 2.4.2
rbenv global 2.4.2

Next, you'll need to make sure that you have Nodejs, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and Elasticsearch installed. This can be done easily :

• For OSX using Homebrew : You don't have to do anything! When you run script/setup later on this will be taken care of for you.
• For Debian/Ubuntu based GNU/Linux : apt-get install nodejs postgresql redis-server memcached. For Elasticsearch, follow the instructions on their website.

You will want to set PostgreSQL to autostart at login via launchctl, if not already. See brew info postgresql. Redis and memcached may be setup similarly via launchctl or setup project wide by using foreman, described below.

Now, let's install the gems from the Gemfile ("Gems" are synonymous with libraries in other languages).

gem install bundler && rbenv rehash

Setup GitHub Classroom

If you are using Linux, configure PostgreSQL :

• Edit /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/postgresql.conf and uncomment #unix_socket_permissions = 0777
• Create a user and give him the rights to create a database : su postgres -s /bin/bash -c "psql -c 'CREATE USER classroom_user; ALTER USER classroom_user CREATEDB'" (Change classroom_user to the username that will run the classroom server)

Once bundler is installed (and PostgreSQL correctly configured for Linux users) go ahead and run the setup script :

script/setup

Production environment variables

ENV Variable	Description
AIRBRAKE_PROJECT_ID	the ID for application in airbrake.io, if set Airbrake will be enabled
AIRBRAKE_PROJECT_KEY	the PROJECT_KEY in airbrake.io, if set Airbrake will be enabled
CANONICAL_HOST	the preferred hostname for the application, if set requests served on other hostnames will be redirected
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_TRACKING_ID	identifier for Google Analytics in the format UA-.*
PINGLISH_ENABLED	Enable the /_ping endpoint with relevant health checks
MOTD	Show the message of the day banner at the top of the site

Development environment variables

These values must be present in your .env file (created by script/setup).

ENV Variable	Description
CLASSROOM_WEBHOOK_URL_PREFIX	Ngrok url to receive webhooks (run ./script/ngrok).
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID	the GitHub Application Client ID.
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET	the GitHub Application Client Secret.
NON_STAFF_GITHUB_ADMIN_IDS	GitHub user_ids of users to be granted staff level access.

To obtain your GitHub Client ID/Secret you need to register a new OAuth application.

After you register your OAuth application, you should fill in the homepage url with http://localhost:5000 and the authorization url with http://localhost:5000/auth/github/callback.

To obtain your GitHub User ID for the NON_STAFF_GITHUB_ADMIN_IDS field, go to https://api.github.com/users/your_username

Testing environment variables

If you want to make a functionality change to the application you will need to write tests to accompany that change. In order to do this, the test values in the .env file must be filled in.

GitHub Classroom uses VCR for recording and playing back API fixtures during test runs. These cassettes (fixtures) are part of the Git project in the spec/support/cassettes folder. If you're not recording new cassettes you can run the specs with existing cassettes with:

script/test

GitHub Classroom uses environmental variables for storing credentials used in testing, these values are located in your .env file (created by script/setup). If you are recording new cassettes, you need to make sure all of these values are present.

ENV Variable	Description
TEST_CLASSROOM_OWNER_GITHUB_ID	The GitHub user_id of an organization admin.
TEST_CLASSROOM_OWNER_GITHUB_TOKEN	The Personal Access Token for the classroom owner
TEST_CLASSROOM_STUDENT_GITHUB_ID	Test OAuth application client ID.
TEST_CLASSROOM_STUDENT_GITHUB_TOKEN	The Personal Access Token for the student
TEST_CLASSROOM_OWNER_ORGANIZATION_GITHUB_ID	GitHub ID (preferably one created specifically for testing against).
TEST_CLASSROOM_OWNER_ORGANIZATION_GITHUB_LOGIN	GitHub login (preferably one created specifically for testing against).

To obtain these values you will need:

• A teacher (your primary GitHub account)
• A student (another Github account, created for this purpose)
• An organisation that the teacher is an owner of, but the student does not belong to.

It is best if you create your own organization for testing purposes, if you have done so:

To obtain the OWNER_GITHUB_ID value, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/organization_owner_username.

To obtain the OWNER_GITHUB_TOKEN value, you will need to generate a personal access token.

To get the STUDENT_GITHUB_ID value you will need to create another user account on GitHub and get the ID by going to https://api.github.com/users/student_username

To get the STUDENT_GITHUB_TOKEN value you will need to generate another personal access token for the student account.

To obtain the OWNER_ORGANIZATION_GITHUB_ID/LOGIN you can go to https://api.github.com/orgs/organization_name.

Now you should have all of the values filled in, great job!

Running the application

Foreman is setup to manage redis, memcached, sidekiq, and elasticsearch in development mode. Postgresql must be running prior executing foreman.

After that, you may start the rails server in a separate terminal with:

script/server

And another terminal with:

script/ngrok

That's it! You should have a working instance of GitHub Classroom located here

Deployment

We strongly encourage you to use https://classroom.github.com, but if you would like your own version GitHub Classroom can be easily deployed to Heroku.

Help wanted

If you're interested in helping out with Classroom development and looking for a place to get started, check out the issues labeled help-wanted and feel free to ask any questions you have before diving into the code.

Contributors

Classroom is developed by these contributors.

Shout out to GitHub Summer of Code student, Mark Tareshawty, from The Ohio State University for his work on GitHub Classroom.