isbadawi / minerva

python client library for McGill Minerva

minerva

This is a little python library that makes it easier for McGill students to programmatically access information from Minerva. As of this writing, it only supports retrieving unofficial transcript information.

You need a McGill ID and PIN (or McGill email and password) to access Minerva. You can pass these in to the login() function, or set the MINERVA_USER and MINERVA_PASS environment variables (you still need to call login() if you do this).

>>> import minerva
>>> isbadawi = minerva.login()

This retrieves your unofficial transcript.

>>> transcript = isbadawi.transcript()
>>> import pprint
>>> pprint.pprint(transcript.get_courses())
[<Course: COMP 531 - Advanced Theory of Computation>,
<Course: COMP 547 - Cryptography & Data Security>,
... snip ...]

This transcript object can be queried to get courses satisfying certain properties. You can search by semester, course title, section, grade, average, or number of credits. For instance, this gets all Fall 2009 MATH courses in which I got an A:

>>> courses = transcript.get_courses(semester='Fall 2009',
                                     subject='MATH', grade='A')
>>> pprint.pprint(courses)
[<Course: MATH 235 - Algebra 1>,
<Course: MATH 318 - Mathematical Logic>]

Some useful bits:

# What grade did I get in MATH317?
>>> transcript.get_courses(subject='MATH317')[0].grade
u'A'

# Has the grade for COMP762 been posted yet?
>>> transcript.get_courses(subject='COMP762')[0].grade is not None
False

Installation

To install minerva, simply:

$ pip install mcgill-minerva

Note that one of the requirements is lxml, whose installation is sometimes troublesome because it depends on libxml and libxslt. For more detailed instructions regarding this, refer to the lxml website.