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A token lasts 30 days and only a browser login yields one — the account is federated, so the server cannot mint it. Replacing it meant editing .env and recreating the container, every month. `schulcloud token set` (a hidden prompt, or piped input) and a /token page both send it to PUT /api/token. The server checks it with Schulcloud first — well-formed, unexpired, still logged in, the same account — then swaps it into the config every request reads, restarts the keepalive and saves it in STATE_DIR, a new volume, with mode 0600. At startup the newer of the saved token and TSC_JWT_COOKIE wins, unless they belong to different accounts. A refused paste changes nothing, and the token is never logged. The keepalive's pings carry a generation, so a 401 for the old token that arrives after a swap cannot stop the new cycle. `schulcloud token`, whoami and the log report the expiry and warn a week ahead. Found on the way: a host that is off for more than two hours loses the session however long the token has left — this machine lost it overnight — which is what the always-on Pi is for. 174 tests. Smoke 72/72 on the local instance, and a real swap verified end to end there. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The schulcloud CLI
Browses and mirrors your Schulcloud files from a laptop, by talking to the schulcloud-mcp server on the Pi.
Why it goes through the Pi
The CLI never talks to Schulcloud. It holds no jwt cookie, no Schulcloud
credential of any kind — only this server's bearer token.
That is not an accident of layering; it solves a real problem. A Schulcloud session dies after two hours of inactivity, and a CLI process lives for seconds, so a CLI with its own token would be dead most times you reached for it. The Pi already keeps one session alive around the clock. Routing through it means one session, one keepalive, and one place to paste a fresh cookie once a month.
It also means the laptop cannot accidentally end the server's session: nothing here can call logout.
Setup
schulcloud login --server https://mcp.example.org --token <MCP_AUTH_TOKEN> --dir ~/Schulcloud
The token is the same MCP_AUTH_TOKEN the Claude connector uses — one token
guards both surfaces. login verifies it before saving, so a typo fails
immediately rather than on first real use. Config is written to
~/.config/schulcloud/config.json with mode 0600.
SCHULCLOUD_SERVER, SCHULCLOUD_TOKEN and SCHULCLOUD_SYNC_DIR override the
file, for CI or one-off invocations.
Commands
schulcloud status how fresh the server's index is
schulcloud ls [--course <id>] [--long]
schulcloud get <fileId> [--out <path>]
schulcloud sync [--dry-run] [--full] [--prune] [--dir <path>] [--jobs <n>]
schulcloud refresh [--course <id>] [--force]
ls --long prints file ids, which is what get takes.
--course accepts a course or a room id — rooms ("Räume") are mirrored
alongside courses, with their files under the room's name rather than a course's.
refresh asks the server to re-read Schulcloud. Pass --course when you know
what changed: that is a handful of requests, where a full re-crawl reads every
course. The server refuses a repeat within a minute unless you pass --force.
A full re-crawl can take many minutes — the first one downloads every file,
file-manager folders included — so refresh starts it and then polls the
server's status, printing a note every half minute, rather than holding one
request open (which Node's fetch abandons after five minutes).
The server's Schulcloud token (token)
schulcloud token when it expires, and whether the session is alive
schulcloud token set hand the server a fresh one
The monthly chore, with no restart and no .env edit:
- Open a private window and log in to Schulcloud.
- DevTools → Application (Firefox: Storage) → Cookies →
jwt: copy the value. schulcloud token setand paste it at the prompt. The input is hidden.- Close the private window. Left open, it logs the token out about two hours after login (docs/AUTH.md).
Piping works too — wl-paste | schulcloud token set — and a pasted cookie
line such as jwt=…; Path=/ is cleaned up. The token is never a command-line
argument, so it cannot end up in shell history.
The server checks the token with Schulcloud before swapping it in, so a bad
paste changes nothing. It refuses a token that is malformed, expired, already
logged out, or for a different account. A replacement is saved on the server
(STATE_DIR), so a restart keeps it, and the keepalive picks it up at once.
The same form lives at https://<server>/token for when no terminal is at hand.
The cookie is HttpOnly, so no bookmarklet can read it for you; the DevTools
copy is the step that remains.
The file manager (fs)
The Schulcloud file manager ("Dateien") — Persönliche, Kurs-, Team- and Geteilte Dateien — browsed like a filesystem, live:
schulcloud fs ls [path] [--long]
schulcloud fs tree [path] [--depth <n>] [--max-folders <n>]
schulcloud fs find <name> [--path <path>] [--type file|folder] [--long]
schulcloud fs get <path> [--out <path>] [--force] [--jobs <n>]
$ schulcloud fs ls /courses
$ schulcloud fs tree "/courses/FIA24B - SK (Rh)"
$ schulcloud fs find "*Erben*" --path /courses
$ schulcloud fs get "/courses/FIA24B - SK (Rh)/02_Erbrecht" --out ~/Erbrecht
The tree is /my, /courses/<course>, /teams/<team> and /shared; the
German names ("/Kurs-Dateien") work too. Names may contain / — course names
often do — and still resolve; any segment may also be an id from --long.
fs find matches any part of a name, or, given * or ?, the whole name as
find -name does. fs get on a folder downloads everything below it, keeps
the structure, and skips files already present at the same size — so re-running
it resumes. Each folder is one page load on the server, so large trees take a
while.
sync mirrors these files too, under <course>/Kurs-Dateien/…,
Persönliche Dateien/…, Team-Dateien/<team>/… and Geteilte Dateien/, once
the server's index includes them (INDEX_FILE_MANAGER, on by default).
How sync works
It is a one-way mirror, not a two-way sync, and that follows from the data rather than from laziness: Schulcloud file records are immutable — editing a file upstream produces a new record — so there is no content versioning, no conflict resolution and no merge. "Download what I do not have" is the whole algorithm.
Local state lives in .schulcloud-sync.json at the root of the sync directory,
keyed by file record id with the path as derived output. That is what makes
renames cheap: when a teacher renames a board column, the file moves on disk
instead of being downloaded again under a new name and left duplicated under the
old one.
What it checks, and why only that:
- Size, not a checksum. The download endpoint exposes no
ETagand Schulcloud publishes no hash, so verifying content would mean re-downloading every file to learn what it already told us. Size reliably catches the failure that actually happens — a truncated or interrupted download — and costs astat. - Downloads land on a
.partneighbour and are renamed into place, so an interrupted run never leaves a half-file that a later run mistakes for complete.
Deletions are not propagated by default. A teacher removing a worksheet is
not a reason to destroy your copy of it; sync reports those as "gone upstream,
kept". Pass --prune to actually delete them.
--dry-run prints exactly what would happen, writes nothing, and does not
advance the cursor.
Cursors
The server's sync cursor is a crawl generation id, not a timestamp. This is
deliberate and measured: GET /course-rooms/{id}/board returns the request
time as updatedAt for most elements, so a timestamp cursor would report every
board as changed on every crawl. Comparing generations by identity also detects
deletions, which no timestamp scheme can.
--since on the server API accepts an ISO date for convenience, resolved to the
nearest generation — but correctness never depends on it.
If the server no longer recognises your stored cursor it returns 409 rather
than silently treating everything as new, so you are never tricked into
re-downloading the world. Run sync --full deliberately in that case.
Paths
Mirror paths are Course/Board/Card/filename, built by core/paths.ts.
Every component of that path originates in Schulcloud — course titles, card
titles and filenames are all user-supplied upstream — so each is reduced to a
single safe path component, and the result is re-checked against the sync root
before anything is written. A file named ../../.ssh/authorized_keys cannot
escape, and sync refuses such an entry rather than writing it.