Canvas-Discord-Bot

A Canvas-integration Bot application for the Discord messaging app.

This bot is self-hosted and runs off of your own individual Canvas API key to access your Canvas courses. Anybody in a server with the bot can use its commands, but it can only access the courses that the canvas account associated with the API key has access to.

See below for instructions and resources to help you configure your own instance of the bot.

Developed by Samith Shetty, Marx Costanzo, Himeth Jayakody, and Samir Appikatla as the final project for ITSC 3155 Intro to Software Engineering at UNC Charlotte

Bot Functionality

Available Commands

By default, all commands will be prefixed with the > symbol, but this can be changed in main.py

• General Commands
  • help provides information on available commands and usage
  • get_courses provides course codes for all available courses that the bot can access
  • get_assignments lists upcoming due dates for a given course
• Announcement Commands
  • add_anouncement subscribes a Discord channel for announcements from a given Canvas course
  • remove_announcement removes a subscription to a given Canvas course
  • list_announcements lists all announcement subscriptions for that Discord channel
• Reminder Commands
  • add_reminder creates a reoccuring daily reminder for assignments due each day
  • remove_reminders deletes a daily reminder
  • list_reminders lists all daily reminders for the Discord channel

Announcements

Announcements are a crucial way for teachers to communicate with students using Canvas. This bot provides a way for users to see announcements in Discord itself whenever they are posted.

Announcement in Canvas

Announcement automatically sent in Discord

Announcement subscriptions are channel-specific, so you can subscribe different channels (across different servers) to different courses.

To setup announcements in a Discord channel, use the add_announcement command.

Reminders

The bot also allows users to subscribe to courses for daily due date reminders. These are called Reminders, and they behave similarly to announcements as they are also channel-specific, and come with similar commands for setup and configuration, although reminders are set to run at a specific time everyday.

Reminders set to post daily due date reminders for a Software Engineering course at 3:15

To setup reminders in a Discord channel, use the add_reminder command.

Setting up your own instance of the Bot

Since the bot can only run on an individual API Key, users can only set up a working bot for their own Canvas courses. Note: Collecting user API keys to access many different students' courses is against Canvas terms of service. The only proper way to make the bot function for many different people is to get a Developer Key from your institution.

So, rather than trying to use our bot (which has can't access your courses), you can create your own Discord Bot and run it with the code in this repository, using your own API keys instead. To do this you will need to:

1. Clone this repository

You can type git clone https://github.com/MCost02/Canvas-Discord-Bot.git in your command line or download from the main page of the repo. (Temporary) You'll need to clear the csv files except for the first line so that you can have your own reminders rather than that of this template bot.

2. Generate a Canvas API token

Here is a step-by-step tutorial to generate an API key for your Canvas account. Remember to save the token code, as we'll need it later.

3. Create a Discord Bot

Here is a tutorial to create the actual Bot account in Discord. This will be the account that send messages and interacts with the user, so you can customize the name and profile picture however you see fit. Remember to save this token as well.

4. Create a Heroku account and application to host your bot for free

This step will be the most tedious, so be patient. You can follow the first part of this tutorial to set up an account and application, but the Procfile, requirements.txt, and runtime.txt files have already been created. Instead of running git init, run the command git remote add heroku <your heroku git link>.

5. Enter the API keys from Canvas and Discord into Heroku and add Buildpack

In your Heroku app dashboard, go to the Settings Tab and scroll the to Config Vars section. This is where you will put your API keys from earlier, under the names CANVAS and DISCORD respectively (this is case-sensitive). Right below this should be the buildpack sections, where you should click the "Add Buildpack" button and select Python.

6. Activate the bot in Heroku and enjoy

If the bot isn't working as intended, you can check the logs from your Heroku dashboard to see what went wrong.