canvas-sak documentation

canvas-sak is a command-line tool for teachers who run their courses in canvas. it exists because the canvas web ui makes you do the same thing thirty times in a row — thirty due dates, thirty grade entries, thirty messages — and a terminal is much better at “thirty times in a row” than a browser is.

where to start

you want to	read
set it up and run your first command	getting started
do one specific thing	the how-to guides below
understand why it behaves the way it does	explanation
look up a command’s options	command reference

if you’re new, read the tutorial first. it’s short, and it ends with you having run a real command against a real course without changing anything.

how-to guides

task-oriented recipes for people who already know what they want.

• set due dates in bulk — the list → edit → set round trip, including per-section dates
• set up assignment groups and weights
• manage rubrics — view, edit, create, and attach rubrics, all through one round-trip file format
• reuse a course from a previous semester
• view and change quiz settings
• exclude files from processing

explanation

why things work the way they do. worth ten minutes before you use anything that writes to a live course.

• why almost everything is a dry run — and the commands that aren’t
• how courses are found — why a course you’re definitely teaching sometimes “doesn’t exist”

reference

• every command and option — generated from the tool itself, so it can’t drift

getting help

• questions: discussions → q&a
• something’s broken: open an issue
• something’s missing from these docs: that’s a bug too, please file it