Took a few days off between Day 3 and Day 4 so just getting to write this post now. Turns out that what I wanted to do for Day 4 was actually simpler to do than I thought.
For my course, all assignments are in their own repo, but to avoid having many little repos, I put all the labs for the course into one repo and make them available within the first week. Students who wish to work ahead by reading the course notes are welcome to do so.
However as all labs are in the same repository, I do not want the submission of one lab to trigger a set of tests for every other lab. I was trying to figure out how to do this in the simplest way possible. It turns out, this is really simple to do. All I need to do is set up a separate workflow for each lab. For the labs, the starter files are all stored in separate folders. All that was necessary was to set up each work flow to trigger on changes made to files within a certain folder.
With this last piece, I think I am ready to use Github actions for testing my student’s submission. The next step is to go through my labs to ensure that the instructions are clear. This is not a short process but I believe the results will be well worth the effort. Not only will it make the assignment submission process be simplified, but it will also introduce students to CI process.
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