Using the Filesystem

The CodeGrade Filesystem is a unique way to mount your CodeGrade instance locally on your system. This provides the teacher much flexibility by allowing to test, review and grade work from students locally, in your favourite editor and using all required tools. After installing the CodeGrade Filesystem, open the installed application to mount your CodeGrade instance.

To use the CodeGrade Filesystem, you have to sign in with your CodeGrade account to your CodeGrade instance. If CodeGrade is integrated into your LMS at your institution, you first have to set up a password by following this guide.

After selecting your institution from the dropdown list in the Filesystem, sign in with your CodeGrade username and password.

Note

Select Other to sign in to a custom CodeGrade instance.

Some advanced options are available to further customise your CodeGrade mount:

• Location: The mount location defaults to the Desktop, but can be set anywhere else. A CodeGrade mount-folder will automatically be created in the selected directory.

• Revision mode: (Previously fixed mode) Turn on to sync all edits, deletions and additions of files in submissions, these will then be visible to the students as Teacher Revisions. Disabling will still allow adding files, however these files will not be synced with CodeGrade or shown to the student.

• Assigned to me: Only show submissions that are assigned to you. Only has effect if submissions are actually assigned and you are one of the assignees.

• Latest submissions only: Only show the most recent submission of each students. On by default, turn off to see all attempts by the student.

• Notifications: Verbosity of the notifications. Defaults to All, choose Critical only to only see critical notifications and use Debug to also log all notifications.

Finally press Start to mount the CodeGrade Filesystem. Press the path at the top or manually navigate to the mount point to find the CodeGrade mount. All mounts follow the structure of Course/Assignment/Student_Submission/. All folders with student submissions follow the naming format Full Student Name - DATE TIME, with hand in time and date. Folders contain, next to the handed in files by the student, special files to control the Filesystem. Read more about these special files, and their usage, below.

To unmount the CodeGrade Filesystem, simply press Stop or close the application.

Note

CodeGrade Filesystem usage logs can be manually exported to JSON by pressing Export log. It is useful to save the log if unexpected errors occurred, so we can better help you out and fix any problems that may occur while using the CodeGrade Filesystem.

Command Line Tools (deprecated)

Installing the filesystem automatically installs the cgfs command, which is also used in the back-end of the GUI. Use cgfs --help for an overview of the options of the cgfs command line tool.

Warning

The CodeGrade Filesystem Command Line Tools are deprecated, using the CodeGrade Filesystem GUI is highly recommended.

Create an empty folder to mount in before using the CodeGrade Filesystem, this can be done with the mkdir mnt command. After creating this mnt folder, use the CodeGrade Filesystem Command Line Tools to mount: cgfs -p PASSWORD -u CODEGRADE_URL USERNAME mnt/. In which PASSWORD and USERNAME should be replaced with valid CodeGrade account details for the CodeGrade instance found at the CODEGRADE_URL.

Note

The CodeGrade URL given at the -u flag should direct to the API and should thus end with api/v1/ (i.e. https://codegra.de will become https://codegra.de/api/v1/).

Note

The CGFS_PASSWORD and CGAPI_BASE_URL environment variables can be set to respectively pass the password or CodeGrade URL. Additionally, leaving out the -p flag will force cgfs to prompt for your password.

Warning

Adding or modifying files as teacher when not mounted with --fixed flag makes changes public to the student if the student has the View teacher revision permission.

Special Files

The CodeGrade Filesystem also creates a few special files, these are files that are not submitted by a student but can be used to control CodeGrade. The format of these files is validated on each save, which fails if not correct. The following special files exist in the CodeGrade Filesystem:

Note

Special files are only editable with the right permissions.

Name	Editable	Location	Use	Format
.api.socket	✗	Root	Location of the api socket	Single line with file location
.cg-mode	✗	Root	Mode file system	FIXED or NOT_FIXED
.cg-assignment-id	✗	Assignment	Id of this assignment	Single line with id
.cg-assignment-settings.ini	✓	Assignment	Settings for this assignment	Ini file with settings
.cg-edit-rubric.md	✓	Assignment	Rubric for this assignment, editing changes the rubric	See .cd-edit-rubric.help
.cg-edit-rubric.help	✗	Assignment	Help file for the rubric file	Plain text file
.cg-feedback	✓	Submission	The general feedback for this submission	Plain text file
.cg-grade	✓	Submission	The grade for this submission	Single float or empty to delete or reset the grade
.cg-rubric.md	✓	Submission	The rubric for this submission	Markdown file where a ticked box means the item is selected.
.cg-submission-id	✗	Submission	Id of this submission	Single line with id

Warning

Only the markdown checkboxes in the .cg-rubric.md file should be changed to fill in the rubric.

Note

In the case the exact format of a special file is not followed and it cannot be easily recovered, the __RESET__ string can be written to any writable special file to reset it to its server state.

Automatic Grading

The filesystem is especially useful for assignments with automatic grading scripts. Automatically generated grades and feedback can be written to the .cg-grade, .cg-feedback and .cg-rubric files to submit automatically to CodeGrade. This allows you to easily use existing grading scripts with little editing. Please consult the CodeGrade AutoTest documentation for more information on (more elaborate) automatic assessment in CodeGrade.

Warning

If the Filesystem is mounted in revision mode (previously fixed mode), any files added to submissions will be visible to students in the Teacher Revision. Do not mount in this mode to prevent testing scripts to be published to your students.