Writing your configuration file

Your configuration file is used to store your login details, a list of your courses, as well as other preferences. While welearn_bot can function without a a configuration file (you will be prompted for essential details during runtime), having a configuration file saves a lot of effort, and enables you to automate the program.

Location

On *nix systems like linux and macos, you should create a ~/.welearnrc file. On Windows, create a welearn.ini file in your user's home directory, typically C:\User\USERNAME\. Henceforth, we'll refer to this file as our config file.

Structure

Your config file will contain various settings or keys, which you set values to. These are grouped into sections based on the purpose of the key. Following are the various sections you can have in your config file.

Authentication

This section contains two keys, both optional. It should be formatted like this.

[auth]
username = YOUR_USERNAME
password = YOUR_PASSWORD

Only save your username and password in a config file if you are on your personal computer, and nobody else has access to your config file! In case one or more of these keys are missing, you will be prompted for them when you run the script.

Courses

This section contains a list of courses you are enrolled in.

[courses]
MA1101
PH2202
CH3303

This is done so that the script doesn't have to query the server every time to get the courses you are enrolled in. If you supply the keyword ALL as a command line argument while running the script, for instance

welearn_bot files ALL

the word ALL acts as shorthand for all the courses under the [courses] section. This means that you can choose to leave out certain courses which you don't want use this shorthand for. You can still query them by name of course, the command

welearn_bot files XY1203

is valid as long as you are enrolled in the XY1203 course, regardless of whether it is specified under the [courses] section.

The most typical use case for the ALL keyword is for showing and pulling from all your due assignments.

welearn_bot -d assignments ALL

This may be shortened to

welearn_bot -d a ALL

Files

This section contains options regarding the organization of your downloaded files. All keys are optional, and are overriden by analogous options if supplied by the command line. This has the format

[files]
pathprefix = ~/path/to/your/common/folder
ignore = mp4, mkv, avi

The pathprefix key lets you specify the directory under which all your course folders are to be located. This will be the case no matter where you run the script from. Note that in the absence of this key (as well as the --pathprefix option), the default behaviour is to use the directory the script is called from. Supposing that the pathprefix points to a directory named WeLearn, your directory structure after pulling a few files may look like this.

WeLearn
├── MA1101
│   └── ... ... .pdf
├── PH2202
│   └── ... .pdf
└── CH3303
    ├── ... .pdf
    ├── ... ... .pdf
    └── ... .pdf

The ignore key stores a list of comma separated file extensions which you want the script to ignore while downloading. This may be useful if you don't want to download large files such as video or audio files.

Google Calendar

This section contains keys needed to connect with Google Calendar. Google Calendar integration is completely optional, so you can skip this section if you wish. Follow the instructions on obtaining a client_id and client_secret, and fill in this section as follows.

[gcal]
client_id = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.apps.googleusercontent.com
client_secret = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you want your events to be saved to a calendar other than your primary one, go to Google Calendar, open your chosen calendar's settings, scroll down to "Integrate calendar" and copy the "Calendar ID". Add the following key under the [gcal] section.

calendar_id = c_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@group.calendar.google.com