Better Canvas

A client-only Vue 3 app that replaces Canvas LMS's own UI for reading course content: module browsing, assignment tracking, and code-heavy reading material, for a single user against a single Canvas instance (chasacademy.instructure.com).

See CONTEXT.md for the domain vocabulary and docs/adr/ for the architectural decisions behind the proxy and auth approach.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev

• pnpm typecheck — type-check with vue-tsc
• pnpm test — run the test suite (Vitest)
• pnpm build — type-check and build for production

Branch, PR, and release workflow

Feature branches PR into dev; dev periodically PRs into main to release. CI (lint, typecheck, test) gates every PR into either branch. Hotfixes branch off main and go through the same PR/CI gate before being merged back into dev. See docs/adr/0003-branching-and-release-workflow.md for the full policy (tagging, versioning, and branch protection detail) and CHANGELOG.md for the release history.

Deployment (Vercel)

This app deploys to Vercel as static hosting plus one serverless function (api/canvas-proxy.ts) that proxies Canvas API requests to work around Canvas's missing CORS headers (see docs/adr/0001-client-only-no-backend.md).

No deploy-time environment variables are required: the proxy's upstream Canvas host is hardcoded in api/canvas-proxy.ts, and the user's Personal Access Token is entered client-side on first connect and forwarded per-request through the proxy — it is never stored or read server-side (see docs/adr/0002-personal-access-token-auth.md).

vercel.json defines the routing needed for the deploy to work:

• /api/v1/* rewrites to the canvas-proxy function.
• Each client-side route (/connect, /picker, /settings, /previous-lectures, /programs/:path*) has its own rewrite to /index.html, so a direct load or page refresh on that route resolves correctly, not just in-app navigation. / is served as index.html directly, needing no rewrite.

Adding a new top-level client-side route (see src/router/index.ts) means adding its rewrite here too — there's no catch-all fallback, by design (a broad /(.*) rewrite has caused problems on this project before).

A push to main (via Vercel's Git integration) or a vercel deploy/ vercel --prod from a directory linked to the project (vercel link) is sufficient to produce a working deploy — no manual post-deploy steps.