Otter Configuration Files¶
In many use cases, the use of the otter.Notebook class by students requires some configurations to be set. These configurations are stored in a simple JSON-formatted file ending in the .otter extension. When otter.Notebook is instantiated, it globs all .otter files in the working directory and, if any are present, asserts that there is only 1 and loads this as the configuration. If no .otter config is found, it is assumed that there is no configuration file and, therefore, only features that don’t require a config file are available.
The available keys in a .otter file are listed below, along with their default values. The only required key is notebook (i.e. if you use .otter file it must specify a value for notebook).
{
"notebook": "", // the notebook filename
"endpoint": null, // the Otter Service endpoint
"assignment_id": "", // assignment ID in the Otter Service database
"class_id": "", // class ID in the Otter Service database
"auth": "google", // the auth type for your Otter Service deployment
"save_environment": false, // whether to serialize the environment in the log during checks
"ignore_modules": [], // a list of modules whose functions to ignore during serialization
"variables": {} // a mapping of variable names -> types to resitrct during serialization
}
Configuring Otter Service¶
The main use of a .otter file is to configure submission to an Otter Service deployment. This requires that the endpoint, assignment_id, and class_id keys be specified. The optional auth key corresponds to the name of the service’s auth provider (defaulting to google). With these specified, students will be able to use Notebook.submit to send their notebook submission to the Otter Service deployment so that it can be graded. An example of this use would be:
{
"notebook": "hw00.ipynb",
"endpoint": "http://some.url",
"assignment_id": "hw00",
"class_id": "some_class",
"auth": "google"
}
More information can be found in Grading on a Deployable Service
Configuring the Serialization of Environments¶
If you are using logs to grade assignemtns from serialized environments, the save_environment key must be set to true. Any module names in the ignore_modules list will have their functions ignored during serialization. If variables is specified, it should be a dictionary mapping variables names to fully-qualified types; variables will only be serialized if they are present as keys in this dictionary and their type matches the specified type. An example of this use would be:
{
"notebook": "hw00.ipynb",
"save_environment": true,
"variables": {
"df": "pandas.core.frame.DataFrame",
"fn": "builtins.function",
"arr": "numpy.ndarray"
}
}
The function otter.utils.get_variable_type when called on an object will return this fully-qualified type string.
>>> from otter.utils import get_variable_type
>>> import numpy as np
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> get_variable_type(np.array([]))
'numpy.ndarray'
>>> get_variable_type(pd.DataFrame())
'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'
>>> fn = lambda x: x
>>> get_variable_type(fn)
'builtins.function'
More information about grading from serialized environments can be found in Logging.