Instructor ships CodeHub Classroom as free local alternative to sunset GitHub Classroom

GitHub Classroom is gone

According to a post on dev.to, GitHub Classroom — launched in July 2013 — was sunset in August 2026, and instructors who depended on it for distributing and collecting programming assignments were left hunting for a replacement. The author of the post, who teaches computer programming at the post-secondary level, notes that the official suggestions point toward other online services, which raises a problem for schools that are uneasy about student names, email addresses and other personal details flowing through unfamiliar platforms.

To fill the gap, the author has built and released CodeHub Classroom, a free desktop application that covers the core job GitHub Classroom did: turning an assignment template into a private repository per student and then giving each student access to their own repo.

Provision, then release

CodeHub Classroom organises assignment setup around two explicit steps, a workflow the author describes as opinionated on purpose and refined through more than a decade of day-to-day use of GitHub Classroom.

The first step, Provision, generates each student's private repository from the teacher's assignment template while nobody else has access. The second step, Release, invites each student as a collaborator on their own repository at the exact moment the teacher chooses. Splitting the two means an assignment can be fully prepared ahead of time and opened up on schedule.

One term, one dashboard

The app also changes the underlying organisation. GitHub Classroom required a separate "classroom" for each course section, so an instructor teaching three sections of the same course had to duplicate setup work for shared assignments and risk copy-paste mistakes. CodeHub Classroom instead shows every course and section in the current term in a single dashboard.

No backend, local data only

Unlike the hosted service it replaces, CodeHub Classroom runs entirely on the instructor's machine. There is no backend, no GitHub App and no shared service account that GitHub could rate-limit; the app simply drives the git and GitHub CLI (gh) tools, so anyone who already has the GitHub CLI installed has what the app needs.

Privacy is a central design goal. All classroom data lives locally on the user's computer as JSON, the author states, with no student information exposed to a remote service, and a data-storage settings screen provides an export path before uninstalling.

Free beta, paid edition planned

The application is free, which the author attributes to the reality that instructors rarely have money to spare for basic tooling. A one-time-purchase Pro/Plus edition is planned for later, modelled on tools such as Beyond Compare, but the author says there will be no subscription and the core feature set stays free.

The public beta, version 0.1.10-beta, shipped on August 31, 2026 as a Windows build. The author calls it early and is asking instructors who try it for bug reports, feedback and descriptions of what their workflows actually need. Releases and the issue tracker are hosted on GitHub.

Why it matters

The retirement of a free service after thirteen years is a reminder of how much teaching infrastructure sits on products that can be withdrawn at short notice. For computing educators, the shutdown of GitHub Classroom was more than an inconvenience: the recommended migration paths raised questions about student data, and retooling between or during terms carries real cost. CodeHub Classroom points at a different model — a local tool with no hosted accounts, no central data store and an exit path consisting of plain JSON files. It is a beta from an individual instructor rather than an institutional product, so long-term maintenance and support beyond Windows remain open questions. But as a response to a sudden platform sunset, it shows that the git and GitHub CLIs beneath such services are enough to build a practical replacement.