Command-line autograde assignments don't appear in formgrade web app

I’ve been using nbgrader + JupyterHub for an introductory course the past couple of years, and in that time both platforms have seen extensive and backwards-incompatible architectural changes; I think I’ve stumbled upon another one.

Over the past few days, I’ve gone through the process of releasing, collecting, and autograding my first assignment, all via the command line:

nbgrader release A1
nbgrader collect A1
nbgrader autograde A1

However, when I click the “Formgrader” tab, I don’t see any assignments listed. Furthermore, none of my students appear there, either (I manually entered both them and the assignments into the nbgrader_config.py file at the start of the course). I feel like I may have missed a step in the configuration process.

Operating system

Ubuntu 16.04

nbgrader --version

0.5.4

jupyterhub --version (if used with JupyterHub)

0.8.1

jupyter notebook --version

5.5.0

Expected behavior

I’d expected to see the assignments (at least the autograded one, after running the aforementioned sequence of command-line options) listed in the formgrader web app.

Actual behavior

No assignments (or students) are listed.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

The nbgrader commands I listed out before were not done seconds after the other; the assignment was released last week, and I just collected and autograded them this morning (via command-line). Then, intent on fixing some grades manually, I went to the Formgrader tab and discovered it was empty.

[jhamrick]

My first thought is what’s going on is that you don’t have the nbgrader root directory properly configured in a way that the notebook server is able to understand. In particular, when you launch the notebook server, it will look for a nbgrader_config.py file in the current directory (or in the default Jupyter config paths, which you can find using jupyter --paths). If those nbgrader_config.py file(s) do not specify the config option for c.CourseDirectory.root = '/path/to/your/coursedir'.

This is documented in the JupyterHub config docs (https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/configuration/jupyterhub_config.html) but not for regular usage of nbgrader. There should probably be some instructions to this effect here: https://nbgrader.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user_guide/creating_and_grading_assignments.html#accessing-the-formgrader-extension

Can you try setting the root config and let me know if that fixes the problem?

[ttimbers]

In the meantime, I’ve somehow fixed things. I think it was because I went ahead and copied over the gradebook.db file to the home user directory (that the formgrader seemed to want to point to), then suddenly it seemed aware of the main course directory. I could even delete all the course-specific folders I mentioned hard-copying over from the course directory to the home user directory, as well as the gradebook.db file itself (the one I’d copied), and the formgrader is still clearly pointing to the right course folder.

I’ll need to try and replicate this behavior later.

I can confirm that I just replicated a similar behaviour. On my laptop, gradebook.db needs to be in the root of the nbgrader directory (that has source, release, etc) but on the JupyterHub server, it needs to be one directory above that…