Bulk URL Changes in existing Courses

[KenJohnson]

We have a large quantity of pre-built course masters which have about 20-30 unique links embedded to our knowledgebase across each course - these handle user support issues and answer questions relevant to certain areas of Canvas for our users.

Our KB URL has changed as a result of a vendor-required move to their cloud services and we have been trying without much success to identify a quick find/replace solution across these courses for each unique URL (ie changing kb.myschool.edu/5we487 to cloud.mykbprovider.com/myschool/5we487)

Has anyone done something similar and have a good direction to point me I can suggest to our team?

Thanks for your wisdom!

[chriscas]

Hi @KenJohnson ,

If you use a paid Instructure-hosted Canvas environment, I'd suggest reaching out to your CSM about this.  We had something similar a few years ago with an LTI where we migrated domains and needed to replace all instances of oldurl.com/blah/blahblah with newurl.com/blah/blahblah and Instructure was able to run a script to do this in pretty much all areas of Canvas we identified for them (announcements, pages, discussions, assignments, quizzes).  There may or may not be a fee for them doing this now, but as long as it's reasonable, I'd suggest doing that over any other method.

If you don't use an Instructure-hosted Canvas, someone in your IT area might have direct Canvas database access to search and replace.

If that's neither of the above work out, you might be able to use the API along with a scripting language like python to crawl through everything to search/replace/update.  I have contemplated writing some python code for this to share with the community in the past, but it's never bubbled up to the top of my priority list, especially with the extra COVID-related workload in the last year.  This method might be very slow, given the amount of API calls and lookups/replaces involved, especially if you have a lot of courses to modify.  Given enough time to run, I think it should work though.

Hope this helps and at least gives you a few options to consider before going to a totally manual method.

-Chris