Releasing an assignment

.. seealso:: :doc:`/command_line_tools/nbgrader-assign` Command line options for ``nbgrader assign`` :doc:`01_philosophy` Details about how the directory hierarchy is structured

After an assignment has been created with the assignment toolbar, you will want to create a release version of the assignment for the students. As described in :doc:`01_philosophy`, you need to organize your files in a particular way. For releasing assignments, you should have the master copy of your files saved (by default) in the following directory structure:

source/{assignment_id}/{notebook_id}.ipynb

(Note: here, the student_id is not included, because there is only one master version for all students, and only one release version for all students).

After running nbgrader assign, the release version of the notebooks will be:

release/{assignment_id}/{notebook_id}.ipynb

As the instructor, you will need to provide your own infrastructure for actually getting this release version to students.

Example

In the following example, we have an assignment with two notebooks:

Before we can create the release version, we first need to set up the database. We'll use the default database url, which is just to a sqlite database called gradebook.db in the current directory. At this point, all we need to do is just add the assignment to the database; we'll also include a due date for it:



In [ ]:

    
import os

# remove an existing database
if os.path.exists("gradebook.db"):
    os.remove("gradebook.db")

# create a connection to the db using the nbgrader API
from nbgrader.api import Gradebook
gb = Gradebook("sqlite:///gradebook.db")

# add the assignment to the database
gb.add_assignment("Problem Set 1", duedate="2015-02-01 15:00:00.000000 PST")

Now that we have the gradebook setup, we can actually run nbgrader assign. Note that we need to pass it the name of the assignment (which is "Problem Set 1"). We also specify that a header notebook (source/header.ipynb) should be preprended to the beginning of each notebook in the assignment:



In [ ]:

    
%%bash

nbgrader assign "Problem Set 1" --IncludeHeaderFooter.header=source/header.ipynb

After doing this, there will be a new folder called release with the same structure as source, but with the actual release version of the files: