Message your instructor

Use this to ask a question in your Canvas inbox from the terminal, with a preview before anything is sent.

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 dates will differ in your account.

Prerequisites

A working connection (canvas auth test succeeds — see Getting started).

1. Find the conversation or the recipient

To reply to an existing thread, list your inbox:

canvas inbox list

401	unread	Question about Problem Set 3
402	read	Welcome to CS 101

Columns: conversation ID, read state, subject. Reply to it later with the ID from the first column.

To start a new thread you need the recipient's user ID. The course roster shows it for teaching staff:

canvas enrollments list --course 101

Name          Role               Current Score  Current Grade
------------  -----------------  -------------  -------------
Dana Chen     TeacherEnrollment
Jamie Park    StudentEnrollment  92.5           A-
Sam Okafor    StudentEnrollment  92.5           A-
Lena Fischer  StudentEnrollment  92.5           A-
Alex Rivera   StudentEnrollment  88.0           B+

The roster doesn't print IDs in the table — run it with --json and read user.id from the envelope's data array.

2. Preview the message

canvas inbox send --to 60001 --subject "Question about Problem Set 4" \
  --body "Could you clarify what base case to use for exercise 2?" --dry-run

DRY RUN: POST /api/v1/conversations
Payload: to=60001 subject="Question about Problem Set 4" body=Could you clarify what base case to use for exercise 2?
No mutation sent.

3. Send it

canvas inbox send --to 60001 --subject "Question about Problem Set 4" \
  --body "Could you clarify what base case to use for exercise 2?" --confirm

Message sent (conversation 403)

Replying to an existing conversation

Same gates, using the conversation ID from step 1:

canvas inbox reply 401 --body "Thanks — that clears it up!" --dry-run
canvas inbox reply 401 --body "Thanks — that clears it up!" --confirm

Reply sent

Next steps

• Safety model — what the gates guarantee, and the local audit log every send appends to
• Command Reference — archiving and other inbox commands