Getting Started with CanvasAPI

Installing CanvasAPI

You can install CanvasAPI with pip:

pip install canvasapi

Usage

Before using CanvasAPI, you’ll need to instantiate a new Canvas object:

# Import the Canvas class
from canvasapi import Canvas

# Canvas API URL
API_URL = "https://example.com"
# Canvas API key
API_KEY = "p@$$w0rd"

# Initialize a new Canvas object
canvas = Canvas(API_URL, API_KEY)

You can now use canvas to make API calls.

Working with Canvas Objects

CanvasAPI converts the JSON responses from the Canvas API into Python objects. These objects provide further access to the Canvas API. You can find a full breakdown of the methods these classes provide in our class documentation. Below, you’ll find a few examples of common CanvasAPI use cases.

Course objects

Courses can be retrieved from the API:

# Grab course 123456
>>> course = canvas.get_course(123456)

# Access the course's name
>>> course.name
'Test Course'

# Update the course's name
>>> course.update(course={'name': 'New Course Name'})

See our documentation on keyword arguments for more information about how course.update() handles the name argument.

User objects

# Grab user 123
>>> user = canvas.get_user(123)

# Access the user's name
>>> user.name
'Test User'

# Retrieve a list of courses the user is enrolled in
>>> courses = user.get_courses()

# Grab a different user by their SIS ID
>>> login_id_user = canvas.get_user('some_user', 'sis_login_id')

Paginated Lists

Some calls, like the user.get_courses() call above, will request multiple objects from Canvas’s API. CanvasAPI collects these objects in a PaginatedList object. PaginatedList generally acts like a regular Python list. You can grab an element by index, iterate over it, and take a slice of it.

Warning: PaginatedList lazily loads its elements. Unfortunately, there’s no way to determine the exact number of records Canvas will return without traversing the list fully. This means that PaginatedList isn’t aware of its own length and negative indexing is not currently supported.

Let’s look at how we can use the PaginatedList returned by our get_courses() call:

# Retrieve a list of courses the user is enrolled in
>>> courses = user.get_courses()

>>> print courses
<PaginatedList of type Course>

# Access the first element in our list.
#
# You'll notice the first call takes a moment, but the next N-1
# elements (where N = the per_page argument supplied; the default is 10)
# will be instantly accessible.
>>> print courses[0]
TST101 Test Course (1234567)

# Iterate over our course list
>>> for course in courses:
         print course

TST101 Test Course 1 (1234567)
TST102 Test Course 2 (1234568)
TST103 Test Course 3 (1234569)

# Take a slice of our course list
>>> courses[:2]
[TST101 Test Course 1 (1234567), TST102 Test Course 2 (1234568)]

Keyword Arguments

Most of Canvas’s API endpoints accept a variety of arguments. CanvasAPI allows developers to insert keyword arguments when making calls to endpoints that accept arguments.

# Get all of the active courses a user is currently enrolled in
>>> courses = user.get_courses(enrollment_status='active')

# Get all of the courses that a user is enrolled in as a Teaching Assistant
>>> courses = user.get_courses(enrollment_type='TaEnrollment')

# Fetch 50 objects per page when making calls that return a PaginatedList
>>> courses = user.get_courses(per_page=50)