set due dates in bulk

move every date in a course at once — the usual reason being that you’re reusing last semester’s course and everything is a year out.

the round trip

list-due-dates prints exactly the format set-due-dates reads. that’s the whole workflow:

# 1. dump what's there now
canvas-sak list-due-dates "CS 146" > dates.txt

# 2. edit dates.txt in any text editor

# 3. see what would change — nothing is written
canvas-sak set-due-dates "CS 146" dates.txt

# 4. read that output, then apply it
canvas-sak set-due-dates "CS 146" dates.txt --no-dryrun

step 3 is not optional politeness. a wrong year in a date file is easy to miss and silently reschedules the whole course.

the file format

one assignment per line: the assignment name, a tab, then comma-separated dates.

Homework 1	available=2026-01-15-09:00,due=2026-01-22-23:59
Quiz 1	due=2026-01-25-23:59,until=2026-01-25-23:59
Homework 2	due=2026-02-05-23:59

that separator is a real tab character, not spaces. if your editor converts tabs to spaces, turn that off for this file.

date types

in the file	canvas calls it	meaning
available=	unlock at	students can see and start it from this moment
due=	due at	submissions after this are marked late
until=	lock at	no submissions accepted at all after this

all three are optional — include only the ones you want to set.

date format

YYYY-MM-DD-hh:mm, on a 24-hour clock, in your computer’s local time zone:

2026-01-22-23:59      # 22 january 2026, 11:59pm local

canvas-sak converts to what canvas expects. if you’re travelling, or your laptop is set to a different zone from your campus, that conversion follows your laptop.

different dates for different sections

append the section name in square brackets to give one section its own dates:

Quiz 1	due=2026-01-20-23:59
Quiz 1 [Evening Section]	due=2026-01-22-23:59

the first line sets the assignment’s dates for everyone; the second creates an override for Evening Section only. the section name must match the section name in canvas exactly.

list-due-dates emits these override lines too, so an existing set of per-section dates survives the round trip.

a course that hasn’t started yet

setting up next semester before the term begins is the most common time to do this, and by default canvas-sak won’t find the course:

canvas-sak set-due-dates "CS 146 Spring" dates.txt --inactive

see how courses are found.

checking your work

validate-course-setup looks for assignments with no due date at all, and for until-dates that don’t line up with their due dates:

canvas-sak validate-course-setup "CS 146"

it also checks the links in your course content for broken or unpublished targets, which involves real http requests and can be slow. to check only the dates:

canvas-sak validate-course-setup "CS 146" --no-check-links