CD2 API docs, CD2 cli source code repo?

[ColinMurtaugh]

Hi,

Is there documentation available for the CD2 API? Also, the NPM page for the CD2 cli tool points to an internal source code repository; will this be open-sourced at some point?

If either or both of these items are available, I think they'd be good candidates to add to the "Helpful Links" box on the Canvas Data Users page.

Thanks!

--Colin

[ColinMurtaugh]

@oxana  -- Do you have any information on my questions above? Thanks!

--Colin

[oxana]

Hi, @ColinMurtaugh 

Canvas Data 2 Beta will have a set of APIs available; we will be making CD2 API and cli documentation available in https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/. CD2 cli uses a handful of APIs that will be available for consumption in the CD2 Beta and described in our documentation.

CD2 cli is not open source; we don't have plans to open source it. CD2 uses proprietary data services and their APIs to facilitate data sharing. Open sourcing the code might not be as beneficial to customers without having the entire context of the system open sourced as well. What's your opinion on us open sourcing cli? 

Thank you,

Oxana

[ColinMurtaugh]

Hi @oxana 

Good to know that the API will eventually be documented in the same place as the rest of the regular Canvas API -- that'll definitely make it easier to find.  I realize it may be early yet, but I'm very interested to see the docs when they're ready. 

Regarding open-sourcing the code, I was just thinking about the actual command-line tool code itself; it's understandable that the code that runs the back-end might not be all that generally useful.  Since the Javascript code for the CLI tool gets downloaded when you run `npm install` anyway, I figured it'd be low-risk for Instructure to open-source it, and it'd be helpful to those of us who will probably end up writing our own tooling. (We're a Python/AWS shop, and we'll want to automate the synchronization of our data into our environment.) 

Thanks!

--Colin

[oxana]

@ColinMurtaugh 

The cli code is in npm already; at the moment it points to the Instructure repo. We will explore the option of pushing code to public gerrit repo. For now if  you want to explore the code, you should be able to find it in your node_modules directory after you download the cli.

Oxana