After the term is completed you can archive the course. This is done per course, so it is easy to keep one or more courses ‘open’ to allow a student to finish an incomplete, etc. Note: This procedure is still a work in progress.

Edit the Master Submitty Database Status

1. Switch to the postgres user:

    sudo su postgres
   

   Launch postgres:

    psql
   

   And connect to the master Submitty database:

    \c submitty
   

2. View all of the courses and their current status:

   select * from courses;
   

   or:

   select * from courses where term='s18';
   

   status = 1
   The course is active. All student users assigned to a non-NULL registration section, and all limited access graders, full access graders, and instructors can view the course.

   status = 2 The course is archived. Only instructor users for that course can view the course. TODO: We intend for this access to be read only, but that is currently not implemented.

   Other status codes may be defined in the future.

3. Change the status values as desired, for example:

   update courses set status=2 where term='s18' and course='csci1100';
   

   or archive all courses for the term:

   update courses set status=2 where term='s18';
   

4. Exit postgres

   \q
   

Convert your Course Files & Directories to Read Only

To prevent accidental modification, we recommend that you remove write access from folders and files for archived courses. And we suggest you consider switching the group for your course to limit access to the files of past terms to the current instructors only.

chmod ugo-w /var/local/submitty/courses/<SEMESTER>/<COURSE>

Note that both of these changes can be nontrivial to revert (since the permissions and group ownership are non-uniform within the course directory.

TODO: Add more instructions and notes as the procedure is developed.

Backup your Data

Now’s also a good time to make a final backup the data for the course.

/var/local/submitty/courses/<SEMESTER>/<COURSE>

We recommend that you preserve the submission files for the course in the current location if you plan to run Lichen Plagiarism Detection against past terms.

/var/local/submitty/courses/<SEMESTER>/<COURSE>/submissions

You may also want to backup and/or delete the relevant version control system (VCS) repositories from:

/var/local/submitty/vcs/

Note that a checkout of the files from the repo is stored in this folder for each submission click. Note: We intend to revise autograding to perform a shallow clone of the repository so this will not be a full clone with complete repository history.

/var/local/submitty/courses/<SEMESTER>/<COURSE>/checkout

Finally you may want to make a dump of the current contents of the database.

_TODO: Add instructions… _