reuse a course from a previous semester

canvas’s own course copy gives you an opaque duplicate: to change the wording on one page you click into canvas, find the page, and edit it in a rich-text box. that’s fine for one page and miserable for forty.

download-course-content and upload-course-content turn a course into markdown files on disk. once it’s text, you can edit it in your editor, search and replace across the whole course, and keep it in git — then push it into next semester’s shell.

the workflow

# 1. pull last semester's course down (it has ended, so --inactive)
mkdir cs146-fall && cd cs146-fall
canvas-sak download-course-content "CS 146 Fall 2025" --all --inactive --no-dryrun

# 2. edit the files. change dates, fix typos, update the syllabus.

# 3. see what would be pushed into the new shell
canvas-sak upload-course-content "CS 146 Spring 2026" --all --inactive

# 4. push it
canvas-sak upload-course-content "CS 146 Spring 2026" --all --inactive --no-dryrun

both commands default to --dryrun, including the download — so step 1 needs --no-dryrun to actually write files to disk.

--inactive appears throughout because both the finished course and the not-yet-started one are invisible by default. see how courses are found.

choosing what to transfer

--all covers everything. you can also pick individual kinds of content, each of which maps to a subdirectory:

flag	directory
--pages	pages/
--assignments	assignments/
--discussions	discussions/
--announcements	announcements/
--files	files/
--modules	modules/

use --target (download) or --source (upload) to work somewhere other than the current directory.

page headers

each page file starts with optional header lines — key: value, one per line, before the markdown body:

title: Week 1 — Introduction
published: true
front_page: false

the actual content of the page starts here, in ordinary markdown.

recognised keys are title, published, publish_at, and front_page. parsing stops at the first line that isn’t a recognised key, and that line onward is treated as content — so a document that happens to begin with Note: something won’t lose it.

discussion headers

discussion files work the same way: optional key: value header lines, then the discussion description in markdown. discussions are always created threaded.

title: Discussion: Week 3: Compute
points: 1
assignment_group: Study Discussion
available: 2026-08-24-13:00
due: 2026-08-31-13:00
until: 2026-08-31-13:00
allow_rating: true
only_graders_can_rate: true

reply with your own study question about this week's topic.

title, published, and publish_at work as for pages. the graded headers — points, assignment_group, available, due, and until — make the discussion a graded discussion: points is the score it is graded out of, assignment_group names an assignment group that must already exist in the course, and the dates use the due-dates file format (YYYY-MM-DD-hh:mm, local time) with the same meanings as set-due-dates. allow_rating lets replies be liked, and only_graders_can_rate restricts liking to graders.

sharing one style across pages

markdown gives you a page canvas will render plainly. if you want a consistent visual wrapper without hand-writing html in every file, add a template: header naming an html file relative to your --source directory:

title: Week 1 — Introduction
template: templates/week.html
week_number: 1

content in markdown, as usual.

in templates/week.html, $body receives the rendered markdown, and any other $variable becomes an additional header key you can set per page:

<div class="week">
  <h1>Week $week_number</h1>
  $body
</div>

variables you don’t set come out empty. template variables must appear after the template: line in the page’s headers.

keeping it in git

the point of having your course as text is that you can version it:

git init && git add . && git commit -m "cs146 fall 2025 as taught"

next year you diff instead of remembering.

a caveat worth knowing

upload-course-content skips content that already exists unless you pass --force. if you edit a page locally and re-upload without --force, nothing happens and the command reports success — which reads as a silent failure. use --force when you mean to overwrite.