The Canvas Student Data Export Tool can export nearly all of a student's data from Instructure Canvas Learning Management System (Canvas LMS). This is useful when you are graduating or leaving your college or university, and would like to have a backup of all the data you had in canvas.
The tool exports all of the following data:
- Course Assignments
- Course Announcements
- Course Discussions
- Course Pages
- Course Files
- Course Modules
- SingleFile HTML of Assignments, Announcements, Discussions, Modules
The tool will export your data in JSON format, and will organize it nicely into folders named for every term of every year. Example:
- Fall 2013
- Econ 101
- course files
- modules
- Econ 101.json
- English 101
- course files
- modules
- English 101.json
- Econ 101
- Fall 2014
- Fall 2015
- Fall 2016
- Spring 2014
- Spring 2015
- Spring 2016
- Spring 2017
- Winter 2014
- Winter 2015
- Winter 2016
- Winter 2017
- all_output.json
To run the program, you will need the following dependencies:
pip install requests
pip install jsonpickle
pip install canvasapi
pip install python-dateutil
pip install PyYAML
npm i github:gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
You can install these dependencies using
pip install -r requirements.txt
AND
npm i
Then run from the command line:
python export.py
These are the configuration parameters for the program:
- Canvas API URL - this is the URL of your institution, for example
https://example.instructure.com
- Canvas API key - this can be created by going to Canvas and navigating to
Account
>Settings
>Approved Integrations
>New Access Token
- Canvas User ID - this can be found at
https://example.instructure.com/api/v1/users/self
in theid
field - Path to Cookies File - file needs to be in netscape format, you can get your cookies via a tool like "Get Cookies.txt" by Rahul Shaw. This can also be left blank if an html images are unwanted.
- Directory in which to download course information to (will be created if not present)
- List of Course IDs that should be skipped
If single file fails to find your browser, you can set a path in singlefile.py. If you also want to run additional singlefile arguments that can also be done there.
To avoid manually entering credentials every time you run the program, you can create a credentials.yaml
file in the same directory as the script that has the following fields:
API_URL: < URL of your institution >
API_KEY: < API Key from Canvas >
USER_ID: < User ID from Canvas >
COOKIES_PATH: < Path to cookies file >
You can then run the script as normal:
python export.py
I would love to see this script's functionality expanded and improved! I welcome all pull requests :) Thank you!