bedel

Group registration, per-assignment repositories and deadlines for a course on GitHub, run from one repository in your own organization. A flexible, self-hosted alternative to GitHub Classroom and Classroom 50 (classroom50), built on nothing but issues, teams and GitHub Actions — so every workflow, rule and form is a file you can change.

Set up a course in your browser →

Bedel is Portuguese for the university porter who keeps the rooms and the timetable: he lets you in, and he locks the door when time is up.

What it does

• Groups register themselves. Students fill in an issue form with their student numbers and GitHub usernames. The bot checks each number against your roster, waits for every member to reply /confirm, then creates their team and invites them to the organization.
• One private repository per group per assignment. Release an assignment with one command: it becomes a template, and every group gets a repo seeded from it and an issue that emails them it is out. Groups registering later get theirs automatically.
• Work carries over. An assignment can start as a copy of each group's previous one, with the full history, and the new starting files committed on top.
• Soft and hard deadlines. Pushing after the soft one is allowed and recorded. At the hard one, the repositories become read-only, on the minute. Soft deadlines can follow each class's own weekly session, and the rule is a short Python function you can rewrite.
• Evidence students can't rewrite. Commits after the soft deadline are marked late in GitHub itself, and every push is archived to a private repo, so a force-push doesn't erase when something happened.
• Reports. Who pushed what before which deadline, as a table or CSV.
• Clean teardown. One command removes test groups, repos and invitations after a dry run.

Only student numbers ever reach GitHub: names, emails and the rest of your lists stay on your machine.

After GitHub Classroom

GitHub retired GitHub Classroom on 28 August 2026, pointing teachers to partner tools such as Classroom 50. Like both, bedel gives every group its own repository seeded from a template. The difference is where it runs: bedel is plain files in a repository you own, inside your organization. There is no app to authorize and no server, and every rule (group size, who may register, how deadlines are worked out) is code you can read and change.

	bedel	Classroom 50
GitHub plan	a free organization	Team or Enterprise (free for verified teachers)
Groups	students register against your roster, every member confirms	the first student creates the group, or you assign them
Hard deadline	repositories become read-only on the minute, by themselves	you close the assignment by hand
Autograding	not built in: add a workflow	built in
Changing how it works	edit any file: the whole tool is your copy	your own grading scripts; the app itself is open source and could be forked

Starting a course

In your browser: ajccosta.github.io/bedel walks you through it in six steps. You create the course's organization first, so that both tokens it asks for can be made for that organization alone; it refuses classic tokens and proves each one belongs to the organization before using it. The page has no server, and its Content-Security-Policy lets it talk to api.github.com only. It creates the course's repository from bedel, stores your roster and the bot's token as encrypted secrets, and writes course.json.

Then, the course's own page. Setup turns on GitHub Pages for the course repository, which publishes web/manage.html from it at https://ORG.github.io/registration/. It shows registrations, assignments, deadlines and whether the bot's runs succeed, without a token. With one, it releases assignments, changes the course, replaces the roster and renews the bot's token. It's your course's copy of the code, which changes only when you pull bedel's updates.

From a terminal: you need gh (the GitHub CLI) logged in, git, and Python 3.9 or later.

git clone https://github.com/ajccosta/bedel registration
cd registration
./scripts/setup.sh YOUR-ORG

Setup walks through seven steps and asks before each one: organization permissions, creating YOUR-ORG/registration and pushing this checkout to it, labels, the admin token (a pre-filled page; GitHub has no API for making one), the roster, the course itself (name, group size, time zone, classes) and a final check. It ends with the link to give your students.

The clone keeps bedel as the upstream remote, so later fixes are one command away: git pull upstream main. A course set up from the browser, or with Use this template, starts a history of its own instead, so bedel's later changes have to be merged in by hand.

Everything about the course lives in course.json; everything else is the same for every course. The full guide, including assignments, deadlines, testing and resetting, is in scripts/README.md.

bedel is free software under the MIT License.