Open edX Repo Tools

This repo contains a number of tools Open edX engineers use for working with GitHub repositories.

The set of tools has grown over the years. Some are old and in current use, some have fallen out of use, some are quite new.

Setting up GitHub authentication

Most of these make GitHub API calls, and so will need GitHub credentials in order to not be severely rate-limited. Edit (or create) ~/.netrc so that it has an entry like this:

machine api.github.com
  login your_user_name
  password ghp_XyzzyfGXFooBar8nBqQuuxY9brgXYz4Xyzzy

Change the login to your GitHub user name. The password is a Personal Access Token you get from https://github.com/settings/tokens. Visit that page, click "Generate new token." It will prompt you for your password, then you'll see a scary list of scopes. Check the "repo" option and click "Generate token." Copy the token that appears. Paste it into your ~/.netrc in the "password" entry.

Working in the repo

To work on these tools:

1. Use a virtualenv.

2. Install dependencies:

   make dev-install
   

3. Run tests:

   make test
   

4. Older tools were Python files run from the root of the repo. Now we are being more disciplined and putting code into importable modules with entry points in setup.py.

5. Simple tools can go into an existing subdirectory of edx_repo_tools. Follow the structure of existing tools you find here. More complex tools, or ones that need unusual third-party requirements, should go into a new subdirectory of edx_repo_tools.

6. Add a new entry_point in setup.py for your command:

   entry_points={
       'console_scripts': [
           ...
           'new_tool = edx_repo_tools.new_tool_dir.new_tool:main',
           ...
   

7. If your tool is in its own directory, you can create an extra.in file there with third-party requirements intended just for your tool. This will automatically create an installable "extra" for your requirements.

Older Tools

There are many programs in this repo in various stages of disrepair. A few of them are described in this repo's older README.md file. Others are not described at all, but may be useful, or have useful tidbits in the code.

Feedback

Please send any feedback to [email protected].