GitHub Classroom: Creating Assignment Repositories with Forks Beta Update

[RyanHecht]

Hi everyone,

Thank you to all the teachers who opted in to the Public Beta for creating student repositories with forks! Your feedback has been invaluable as we decide on our path forwards.

In our feedback survey, you told us how useful being able to update student assignments is to your workflows.

However, you also told us your frustrations with setting up your assignments in light of some of the important changes we shared in our beta announcement, particularly:

• Manually needing to turn on forking private repositories for your organization is an annoying additional setup step
• Assignment visibility being tied to the visibility of the starter code restricts flexibility in how you store your starter code
• Giving students access to the upstream starter code in order for them to "Sync changes" makes it too easy for them to accidentally PR their changes upstream, exposing their work to other students
• Directly forking student repositories from the starter code means the starter code repository's commits are no longer automatically squashed, potentially exposing answers to the assignment through the commit history

We have planned changes to address these (and more) concerns brought to our attention during the Beta. You might see these changes as they're implemented if you're opted in to the Beta:

• Classroom will require that your provided starter code is a template repository. When you create your assignment, Classroom will create a new repository from the template with the visibility you select, and use THAT as the base from which student repositories will be forked. This will reinstate your ability to choose assignment visibility when you create a new assignment.
• Classroom will not give students "read" permissions to the upstream starter code repository; instead, teachers will have a button on the assignment dashboard in Classroom that will check for changes and open Pull Requests in all student repositories. Students can then accept the changes from their own repositories. This prevents any possibility of students opening pull requests upstream where their work is revealed to other students
• Classroom will inform you if forking private repositories is turned off for your organization when you select "Private" visibility for your assignment. If you choose to continue, Classroom will automatically change this setting in your classroom's GitHub organization
• Classroom will give you the choice to copy all branches to student assignment repositories, or just the default branch

These changes will start rolling out to current Beta participants in the coming weeks. We anticipate generally rolling out these changes (and moving everybody to the new assignment repository creation strategy) on July 1, 2024.

Thanks again for all your feedback! I'm heading out of office tomorrow, but will be back on the 19th to answer any questions you all have!

[HashmalTech]

no

[ruansimo]

ok

[Kangoma5]

Thank you for swift action to remedy the difficulties faced

[JoeSaf]

okay

[Danny-1103]

okay

[ST10448181]

ok

[magitz]

My classroom, which is opted into the beta, is having an issue where workflow actions that are part of the template are not showing up in the student repos as runnable. If they edit the .github/workflows/___.yml file, even just adding a space, the workflow shows up in the list of runnable actions.

[nick-bennett]

We're having the same problem; not looking forward to the prospect of this still happening for my students' next practical exam.

[euangeleo]

A +1 to this problem. Our template repositories use GitHub Actions for autograding, not the GitHub Classroom tests. Actions seem not to be enabled on the new forked repositories by default. It is not an improved system if we then need to manually go into each student's repository to enable Actions again, so that they can run the tests.

[infoyouth]

Question??
In my new class room i am trying to select a template repo of my own public repo, but it says.
Errors updating assignment. Starter code repository must have at least one commit. Select a repository with commits or create the assignment without starter code.

I checked visibility settings/commits all look good. but still facing that error

[onokajames96]

why is it that after forking the repository i cant stiil push is there i way the accees can be chnaged in that students can easily submit or commit their

[ctnelson1997]

Thank you!

[w0244079]

This is all great...but given that we're back to template repositories to a certain degree, would it be at all possible to provide the ability to have starter code from another private organization? This was removed a number of years ago so now my workflow is this....

Maintain a gold copy of my assignment in a non-classroom organization
Fork the gold copy to any classroom organization that might need it so that the it is available to the classroom as starter code.
Create the assignment from the starter code which now creates a copy of my fork in the same repository due to the template requirement.
I essentially have two repos of the same assignment in the classroom organization.

Could it be possible to be able to use starter code from another private organization that I also own like before so that at least I only have one repository in the classroom repo instead of two?

Thanks,
Michael

[pranavpatel08]

Thank you Michael!
seems like this is the only way for it to pick up the starter repo properly.
However, I am still facing some issue with the autograding. Got any loopholes around that?

[fuhrmanator]

I second @w0244079's request. I don't like any "gold copy" to be in the same org where TAs are owners (TAs are students). I'm not sure this requirement was considered in the current solution.

Otherwise, if there was a way to prevent TAs from having all the permissions (e.g., to delete repos) in the classroom organization, it could mitigate the risk.

[ViktoriiaBukhanets]

Hello dear community!
I have the following issue: when I try to create a new assignment based on repository, this repository has to be a template. But even when I am changing it to template, the error while creating the assignment still preserved. "Errors updating assignment. Starter code repo could not be copied to your organization ". Sometimes I also get "Errors updating assignment. Starter code repository must have at least one commit. Select a repository with commits or create the assignment without starter code". For my colleagues in the organization it does not seem to be a problem even if repository is not a template. Could someone give advises which settings I should check or what could be the issue.

Thanks,
Viktoriia

[nick-bennett]

In my opinion, this is a clumsy step in the wrong direction.

I have a curriculum org, with assignments and solutions in private template repos; I then create an org for each cohort of students I teach. When I create a student assignment, I first create a new repo (from one of the templates in the curriculum org) in the student-cohort-specific org, make the new repo a template, and then use that as the starter repo for the assignment.

I opted in to the new assignment system (with forked student repos) last month; as of one week ago, all of the above was still working fine. But yesterday when I did this, another repo was then unnecessarily created in the student cohort org (as described above in the update post), with a crazy long name (created from the concatenation of a slugified form of the descriptive name of the student cohort org, the name of the repository that I specified as the source, and the name of the assignment), and that unnecessary repo is used as the started repo for the student assignments. This is all as described above—and it's ridiculous. If this is the way this will work, why not go back to what we had a couple years back, where we could select a private template repo from another org as the assignment source? The classroom bot could then create a source repo in the student cohort org from that curriculum org template, and student forks could come from that source repo; at least that would eliminate the duplicated repos in the student cohort org.

Is there utility in having student assignment repos be created automatically as forks of the source org? Of course. However, there are many cases where that is overkill, and creating a student repo from a template (but not as a fork) is entirely sufficient; in working around some of the obvious potential issues with making the student repos forks of the source org, this latest update seems to be a kludgy acknowledgment of this, while complicating the situation for all GitHub Classroom assignment creators.

[DavidMutchler]

Help! I have read the updated instructions. I have been using the new system since June 1. Everything worked for me a few days ago (after the change to the system making a COPY of my template to use as the starter code from which to fork). When I went to create a new assignment Friday, it failed with the message "Starter code repo could not be copied to your organization". That behavior continues today.

As a temporary workaround, I reverted my classroom to the old system. (I then had to change all my starter repos previously created to be templates, for the sake of students who are behind.) But if this problem is not fixed before the final rollout, it will be a disaster for me. *** I STRONGLY RECOMMEND DELAYING the July 1 rollout until adequate testing of the system has been done. ***

Edit June 29: The new system seems to be working for me now. As others have noted:

1. Be sure that your own starter code is a template.
2. The new system makes a copy of that starter code and creates forks from that copy. The copy is oddly-named but the names for projects that students see are fine (and what you would expect).
3. When you are creating a New Assignment, watch carefully when given the option for the forks to be PRIVATE or PUBLIC (there are radio button options for these). Choose PRIVATE if you do not want students to be able to see each other's code. The default for the radio buttons MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT be PRIVATE (it varies for me).

[PalominoVidalCarlos]

I have the same problem, there is some solution?

[RyanHecht]

Hi folks! These issues should be fixed now with our GA release. Let me know if you're still encountering it!

[DavidMutchler]

Thanks for your work! Things are working OK, but I got caught by the following limitation:

The problem is that: (1) Github repository names are limited in length (to 100 characters, I think). (2) The new system creates a new repository named by appending the CLASSROOM name and the STUDENT-REPO-PREFIX-NAME and the STARTER-REPO name. Together, these sometimes exceeded the length limit and sometimes did not, hence my struggles above.

No problem for me now, but this seems likely to bite others.

[ffespechen]

ok

[nrcool]

okay

[cbaker6]

One new bug I've seen (wasn't present last week, but present today) is when I create team assignments, all teams are given Read access to each other's assignments. I had to go in manually and remove access for the other teams. GitHub Classroom did properly give Admin access to proper team, but added the Read access for other teams incorrectly

[mrazmartin]

I have the same issue. The bug has already been in the early "opt-in" version since Feb/March and I have seen people complaining about it back then too. It is a huge issue as students do not accept the assignments at the same time and even when given admin rights over their repos, they can't see other team's viewing rights and hence can't remove it themselves -> only the organization owner can do that! (tough job when having 30+ teams)

[RyanHecht]

Hi folks! This behavior should be fixed now with the final release :) thanks for helping us test it in the beta!

[famosab]

How it was before:

What I understand is happening now:

While I still entered the repo GBI-teaching/Assignment-10

This is really impractical since we only fill the original repo by time and not these sub-repositories that are now newly created. The crazy long name is really confusing.

What will happend when I update the code in the original repo GBI-teaching/Assignment-10? Can I mirror this to the newly created one?

[JohannesvKL]

Hi, we're having the same problem, also made a thread for it https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/129870#discussion-6866331.

[ViktoriiaBukhanets]

Same issue for me. I also wrote the thread for it https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/127455/#discussioncomment-9846387

[danypazz]

ok

[Makeller4]

ok

[CliffBakalian]

• Classroom will not give students "read" permissions to the upstream starter code repository; instead, teachers will have a button on the assignment dashboard in Classroom that will check for changes and open Pull Requests in all student repositories. Students can then accept the changes from their own repositories. This prevents any possibility of students opening pull requests upstream where their work is revealed to other students

I do not see this option available and when testing various configuration options with students, students still have the ability to create pull requests and have all other students see their code. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't think this problem is fixed?

[RyanHecht]

Hi Cliff -- it looks like some of the changes we made on the GitHub.com side took a little longer to take effect. The new functionality should be working as intended now!