Extend nbgrader.db to cope with multiple courses (and think beyond that)

The current nbgrader.db database has no concept of a course: each course has to have it’s own database (configured in the config file)

In our environment, we have

• multiple instructors on a course, and
• one instructor doing multiple courses

We also want to consider how to move to an external database (postgresql/mysql/etc)… but we are also very conscious that the notebook-servers themselves should not have access to create databases in our server (that could be horribly abused :chuckle: )

Our initial thought is to add a courses table, and link assignments to that

Keen to hear who else has been down this route, and what solutions have been tried.

[jhamrick]

It sounds to me like this is something that would be better served by a JupyterHub service which knows how to talk to LTI, rather than adjustments to nbgrader. As I mentioned above, even if you created a shared database for the different courses, you would still need to manually configure the separate course directories and nbgrader_config.py files. So it sounds like what you want is actually a set of scripts on top of nbgrader that perhaps form a JupyterHub service which can do that synchronization for you. I am not really familiar with LTI though, so I could still be misunderstanding.

[jhamrick]

Closed by #1099