Library Functions - Developing your own library of useful functions

As you develop questions, you’ll start realizing that you may be using similar helpful functions over and over again in the various server.py and test.py files you are writing.

You may find it desirable to factor those out into a common library.

The official documentation for how to do this is here:

• https://prairielearn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/python-grader/#course-specific-libraries

For CMPSC 5A, we have added the file serverFilesCourse/cmpsc5a.py to our PrairieLearn/pl-ucsb-cmpsc5a repo.

Keep in mind, however, that for questions with an external grader, the version of this file in the repo is not accessible.

If you want to use those same helper functions, you’ll need to make those available to the external grader another way.

One way would be to set up a github workflow that would automatically copy the contents of serverFilesCourse/cmpsc5a.py from PrairieLearn/pl-ucsb-cmpsc5a into the the desired external grader and reupload that to the docker image.

Another way would be to publish the cmpsc5a library as a pip module and then reinstall it in the serverFilesCourse and the docker image each time it is updated.

For now, though, the easiest thing may be to simply sigh and just copy and paste the functions you need, redundantly, into the test.py files for each question. It isn’t ideal, but until we have a better way, this is something that will work.