Question: Is there any way to check which student repositories have commits?

[connorferster]

Is there a way of checking if a student has done some work on a given assignment? Kind of like check for the reviews but instead of checking for the existence of issues, a way for checking if the student has done any work on the assignment.

[rjglasse]

Hi Connor,

Not at present with the default commands.

However, Repobee was designed with a plugin architecture that allows you to extend it to fit your context. Here's the documentation: https://docs.repobee.org/en/stable/repobee_plug/index.html#repobee-plug - it has some nice examples to help you get started.

I guess you want to have a plugin that uses a post-clone hook to check if the latest commit author matches the prefix of the repo. A more robust alternative would test that the commit author is not one of the repo template authors / teachers, where there may be multiple student usernames in a single repo, or a single student is managing to use multiple identities.

Here's a bit of Python/Bash that will grab the username, assuming you are in the repo's directory.

import subprocess
author = subprocess.check_output("git log -1 --pretty=format:'%an'", shell=True)
print(author.decode("utf-8").lower())

There might be a smarter Repobee way to get the last commit author (@slarse?)

Let us know if you want to have a bash at it, or perhaps we can whip one up :)

[rjglasse]

Alright, this is my first actual attempt at a plugin (started.py), but I like the use case so win-win for me. Here's something that works, but probably needs some improvement:

import repobee_plug as plug
import subprocess
import os

@plug.repobee_hook
def post_clone(repo: plug.StudentRepo, api: plug.PlatformAPI):
    os.chdir(repo.path)
    last_commit_author = subprocess.check_output("git log -1 --pretty=format:'%an'", shell=True).decode("utf-8").strip().lower()
    teachers = ["glassey"]
    if last_commit_author in teachers:
        print("[Repo Status]", repo.name, "has no student activity. The last commit was made by", last_commit_author)

And the trace would look like this for a known non participating student, and silent if student has started:

% repobee -p started.py  repos clone -a task-1 -s xxxx --update-local 
Cloning into student repos ...
Progress batch 1: 100%
Executing post_clone hooks:
[Repo Status] xxxx-task-1 has no student activity. The last commit was made by glassey
Executing post_clone hooks: 100%

Probably smart to export to file, JSON or CSV if you have a lot of students :-)

[slarse]

This is indeed a very good use case for a plugin, thanks @rjglasse for providing a prototype!

There might be a smarter Repobee way to get the last commit author (@slarse?)

Nope, RepoBee doesn't deal with commits at present. However, GitPython provides a pretty nice Python interface to Git, I'd probably use that for better ergonomics. I think I use it somewhere in RepoBee but I forget where at the moment, but a plugin is free to have any dependencies it likes to as long as they don't conflict with the core dependencies (which is why I try to keep the amount of core dependencies tiny).

[connorferster]

Holy smokes, @rjglasse! I really appreciate that. It saves me a good couple of hours of faffing around trying to figure out where to start.