File Sync

drewroyster
Community Novice
8
3348

Having become incredibly frustrated at the frequency my professors added and updated their course files requiring me to download and move files to wherever I had organized them before, I built an app that handles syncing Canvas files to student's computers. 

 

The app is open source using electron js GitHub - drew-royster/canvasFileSync: syncs files from canvas to your local machine to ensure you're... 

 

Any thoughts on how to improve the app or if you could just spread the word I'd appreciate it.

8 Comments
robotcars
Community Champion

Drew,

This is so cool! Happy to see students contributing, solving problems we don't see.

Fantastic choice and use of Electron.

I have passed this on to some of our facilitators, designers, and teachers.

Boekenoogen
Community Contributor

We have been using Google Drive to store and sync files. I will have to take a look at this program to see how it works.

tnijssen
Community Member

This won't work if the instructor has hidden the files page from students.

When that happens, you'd need to scrape the rest of the course to find any file links directly.

drewroyster
Community Novice

Keeping those organized would be somewhat difficult as well. I will probably leave as is for now, but feel free to fork it! I'll merge it in if you get it to work alongside the current functionality.

drewroyster
Community Novice

I just created what could be deemed Version 2.0 which now autogenerates Auth Tokens so it no longer requires the user to go into canvas to generate the token. Because electron is basically a browser I can navigate them to canvas, have them log in, then use their cookies to call the API to generate the token. 

This should now be much easier for non-technical users to adopt.

candrew
Community Participant

I looked for the repo and couldn't find it.  Are you still working on this?  Best,

Chris

drewroyster
Community Novice

I took it down for a bit, because I'm working on a major rewrite that'll be easier for people to contribute to and frankly less embarrassing code. It'll be web packed/ using vuejs and all the latest and greatest tools. So feel free to take a peek at the code as it stands, but I wouldn't work off that branch, because I got some big updates coming. 

you can always download the compiled version at canvasfilesync.com

drewroyster
Community Novice

New Version is out!