Download course files

Use this to pull lecture slides, readings, and assignment sheets onto your machine — one file or the whole course — with a manifest you can script against.

Outputs in the guides were captured from real runs of canvas-cli against a Canvas instance for a fictional student, Alex Rivera. IDs, names, and sizes will differ in your account.

Prerequisites

A working connection (canvas auth test succeeds — see Getting started) and a course ID (canvas courses list).

1. See what's available

canvas files list --course 101

301	syllabus.pdf	241152	application/pdf
302	lecture-07-recursion.pptx	1846272	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation
303	problem-set-4.pdf	88413	application/pdf

Columns: file ID, name, size in bytes, content type.

2. Download one file

Use the file ID from the first column:

canvas files download 303 --out problem-set-4.pdf

Downloaded file 303 to problem-set-4.pdf

--out is required and lands wherever you point it. Add --no-overwrite to fail instead of replacing an existing local copy.

3. Download everything at once

canvas files download-course --course 101 --out course-files

Downloaded 3/3 files
Manifest: course-files/manifest.json

Alongside the files you get two manifests for scripting:

ls -l course-files

total 40
-rw-r--r--@ 1 david  wheel   20 Aug 21 05:51 lecture-07-recursion.pptx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 david  wheel  813 Aug 21 05:51 manifest.json
-rw-r--r--@ 1 david  wheel  667 Aug 21 05:51 manifest.ndjson
-rw-r--r--@ 1 david  wheel   31 Aug 21 05:51 problem-set-4.pdf
-rw-r--r--@ 1 david  wheel   28 Aug 21 05:51 syllabus.pdf

manifest.json records each file's ID, size, local path, and download status (excerpt — the problem-set-4.pdf entry is omitted):

[
  {
    "file_id": "301",
    "filename": "syllabus.pdf",
    "display_name": "syllabus.pdf",
    "content_type": "application/pdf",
    "size": 241152,
    "local_path": "course-files/syllabus.pdf",
    "download_status": "ok"
  },
  {
    "file_id": "302",
    "filename": "lecture-07-recursion.pptx",
    "display_name": "lecture-07-recursion.pptx",
    "content_type": "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation",
    "size": 1846272,
    "local_path": "course-files/lecture-07-recursion.pptx",
    "download_status": "ok"
  },
  ...
]

(manifest.ndjson holds the same entries, one JSON object per line.) Re-running overwrites local copies by default; add --no-overwrite to skip files that already exist.

Next steps

• Check what's due — pair the reading with the assignment it belongs to
• Command Reference — all files flags