Canvas Companion

An Obsidian plugin that keeps your Canvas LMS assignments, due dates, grades and announcements in your vault: one note per course, a This week note with everything due in the next seven days, and an optional calendar feed. Nothing leaves your machine except the requests to your school's Canvas.

• One note per course. Courses/<Course>.md with Upcoming, Past due and Done assignments as task lines (- [ ] HW 4 📅 2026-11-12 ⏰ 23:59 (10 pts) [Canvas](…), the format the Tasks plugin reads; missing and late work is flagged ⚠️ missing / ⚠️ late), the latest announcements converted to markdown, and your current grade. The plugin only touches its own marked blocks; everything you write in the note stays.
• This week. Overdue work first, then one section per day across all courses. Regenerated on every sync.
• Calendar feed. An .ics file of upcoming deadlines you can import into or subscribe from a phone calendar.
• Quiet. Syncs when Obsidian starts and then every 60 minutes by default (settable from 15 to 240 minutes, or off); unchanged notes are not rewritten, so nothing churns in your sync tool or git history.
• Free and open source, MIT licensed. No accounts beyond your Canvas token, no telemetry.

Canvas Companion is part of the Companion suite of local-first Obsidian plugins by Tony Peonio for students and researchers: your machine does the work, every change is a diff you approve, and the numbers are published. The others are Local Vault Agent (local Ollama agent that searches, compiles, edits notes), Lecture Companion (live local lecture transcription, Canvas slides, Ollama summaries), Exam Companion (day-by-day study plan, daily quizzes and flashcards), Paper Companion (Zotero search by meaning, page-cited reading notes), Research Log Companion (append-only lab notebook with git, parameters, data hashes), Job Hunt Companion (job applications as notes, resume tailoring, interview questions), Fellowship Companion (grants and fellowships: deadlines, materials, letters, eligibility), Code Companion (commits in the daily note, weekly report, TODOs), Teaching Companion (local-model rubric grading with verbatim evidence) and Branching Table of Contents (parent/child properties as a rooted family tree). All at github.com/TonyPeonio.

Each works on its own; Canvas Companion and Lecture Companion use the same Courses/<Course>.md note names, so Lecture Companion's notes land next to the assignments for that course.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.7.2 or later (desktop and mobile).
• A Canvas account at a school that has not disabled personal access tokens, and the token itself (next section).

Creating a Canvas access token

The plugin signs in with a personal access token, never with your password.

1. Log in to Canvas in a browser and click Account (your avatar, top of the left sidebar), then Settings.
2. Scroll to Approved Integrations and click + New Access Token.
3. Give it a purpose (e.g. Obsidian Canvas Companion). Leave the expiry empty for a token that does not expire, or set a date; the plugin tells you when a token has expired.
4. Click Generate Token and copy the token now; Canvas shows it only once.
5. In Obsidian: Settings → Canvas Companion, enter your Canvas URL (e.g. https://school.instructure.com) and paste the token. Test connection should name you and count your active courses.

The token is stored only in this vault's .obsidian/plugins/canvas-companion/data.json (exclude that file from anything you publish). To revoke it, delete it from the same Approved Integrations list in Canvas. If your school's Canvas has no + New Access Token button, the administrators have turned personal tokens off and the plugin cannot be used there.

Usage

1. Run Sync with Canvas (ribbon icon, command palette, or wait for the automatic sync).
2. Open Courses/This week.md with Open this week, or open any course note. If the note does not exist yet, Open this week syncs first and then opens it.

Hide courses you do not care about (one name or code per line) and rename courses for the vault with aliases (Fall 2026 CSCI-470-A Machine Learning = CSCI 470), so the note is called what you call the class and Lecture Companion's notes land in the same place.

Commands

How it works

What the plugin reads

Every request is a read-only GET to your Canvas, with the token in the Authorization header. The plugin never creates, changes or submits anything in Canvas.

Paginated lists are followed through Canvas's Link: rel="next" headers (up to 20 pages of 50 per list).

When it syncs

• Once when Obsidian starts (Sync on startup, on by default).
• Every 60 minutes while Obsidian is open (Sync every, 15 to 240 minutes, or 0 for off).
• Whenever you run Sync with Canvas, or Open this week finds no note yet.

Only one sync runs at a time; the status bar shows progress and the time of the last sync.

What it writes

Course notes are rendered into managed blocks bounded by HTML comments:

# CSCI 470

<!-- canvas-companion:assignments -->
## Assignments
…
<!-- /canvas-companion -->
<!-- canvas-companion:announcements -->
…
<!-- /canvas-companion -->

## My notes

Anything you write here survives every sync.

A block already in the note is replaced in place; a missing block is added before My notes; text outside the blocks (front matter included) is never touched, and a note kept in CRLF stays CRLF. A sync with unchanged data produces a byte-identical file and skips the write. Dates are shown in your local time. A course whose assignments or announcements Canvas hides from you (401/403) is kept with a warning line instead of failing the whole sync; an invalid or expired token stops the sync with a message that says how to make a new one.

The .ics file holds one UTC event per upcoming, unsubmitted assignment with a due date (DTSTART at the due time, a stable UID per assignment, the course and points in the description, the Canvas link as URL), folded and escaped per RFC 5545.

Privacy and network use

The plugin talks only to the Canvas URL you set, with the token you pasted, using Obsidian's requestUrl, and only through the read-only endpoints listed above. It downloads nothing but JSON and writes only the notes and the .ics file described above. No analytics, no third parties.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch build → main.js
npm test        # unit tests (vitest), no Canvas needed
npm run build   # type-check + Obsidian review lint + production bundle

The core (src/core/) has no Obsidian dependency and is tested against an in-memory HTTP fake, an in-process mock Canvas HTTP server (tests/canvas-server.test.ts) and an in-memory note store; src/main.ts and src/settings-tab.ts are the thin Obsidian layer. To release: bump version in manifest.json and package.json, add it to versions.json, write release-notes/<version>.md, commit, push a tag named exactly <version>.

License

MIT