This is intended to be a simple process that does heavy lifting and stays out of the way.

For each course that is enabled for automation, by default:

• A dedicated Namespace is created in Gitlab
• All students are given individual Projects (git repository)
• Nominated Graders, and others, get appropriate access roles to Projects and the enclosing namespace
• Customization is respected by the automation
• Registrar data (rosters) are processed nightly, and data is refreshed every 1 hour

The overall automation tool is controlled by Techstaff. However, certain levels of customization are available to instructors and other course staff.

Before establishing any repositories, the automations server can be optionally configured to read configuration that is published in your own secure Gitlab repository. Note that the automations can only read from certain known Gitlab servers.

Every hour, the automations bot will checkout the head of your main or other nominated branch and scan a directory for YAML files containing course and enrollment data. The format of the YAML file is given here

# sample config to be checked into a file rosters.d/sample.yaml
#
my-globaly-unique-id-1234-aut-2020:
  display_name: my-special Custom Course Taking Place in 2020
  memberships:
    instructor:
      - rdb
    student: 
      - kauffman
      - tdobes
    ta:
      - chudler
    grader:
      - ctopper