GitHub Classroom: "Repository Access Issue"

[gchallen]

Hi everyone,

We're using GitHub Classroom to help students set up repositories in my ~1000 student CS1 course at Illinois. Overall it works great! However, it seems like every semester we run into some strange issue.

This term one student arrives at the following screen when trying to accept the Classroom invitation:

I've checked both through Classroom and in our organization where the repositories are created, and can verify that there are no repositories created for this student. In the past when we've had repository creation issues I've been able to delete the semi-created repository and start over. But in this case I'm at a loss for what to do. I'm suggesting that the student try creating a new GitHub account and see if that helps, but that's not a great workaround.

I'm happy to provide more details if someone from GitHub can look into this more closely. Thanks in advance!

A suggestion...(optional)

No response

[girodg]

any updates on this? I have a student encountering the same problem.

[chrissexton]

If your organization has 2FA requirement turned on, be sure the student actually has their account set up for it.

[gchallen]

FYI, at least in the case posted above the student's GitHub account had actually been disabled. So that's something else to check.

[LiliWeiSE]

Hi,
May I know how we can check whether a student's GitHub account was actually disabled?

[Mayank447]

I had the same issue. Go the student's repository, in my case it was created but when the student tried accessing it, it showed the same error. Manually invite him and the error should get fixed.

[emmett-tomai]

@StefanidisK go to the student repo through the assignment list, click settings > collaborators and teams. under manage access you'll see a pending invite. for whatever reason, that invite is invalid, so delete it and re-invite (Add people). use their github username and grant write access.

when the student goes back to github the new invite will either automatically pop up for them, or they can click on the inbox icon in the upper-right with the blue dot and accept.

about half my students are getting hit with this this semester.

[StefanidisK]

@StefanidisK go to the student repo through the assignment list, click settings > collaborators and teams. under manage access you'll see a pending invite. for whatever reason, that invite is invalid, so delete it and re-invite (Add people). use their github username and grant write access.

when the student goes back to github the new invite will either automatically pop up for them, or they can click on the inbox icon in the upper-right with the blue dot and accept.

about half my students are getting hit with this this semester.

Thank you. Someone else sent me these instructions too and I got it working. Thanks!

[AndrewVenegas]

Hi guys, does anyone know how to solve this efficiently?

I have 100 students and I’m currently sending each of them a new invitation manually.

Thank u!

[nikmomo]

Hi guys, does anyone know how to solve this efficiently?

I have 100 students and I’m currently sending each of them a new invitation manually.

Thank u!

https://github.com/nikmomo/GHClassroom.AccessFix This would help. I am running it on 2 courses with 5 sections

[bogdanned]

Hey there, same here, we have 100s of student and a dozen repositories...

[norandomtechie]

Just wanted to drop my two cents on this:

This appears to be happening for every student in our course as of February (about 200 this semester), not just the one. Thankfully it does seem like the repositories are getting created, but the issue has still not been fixed - if anything, it's worse.

[CodyHenrichsen-CTEC]

I just had three students with the same error. I am going to try resetting the repo.

[CodyHenrichsen-CTEC]

Deleted repo and recreate is the same error for students. up to 5 now

[Parsa-Rajabi]

Following this post for updates. The issue has bubbled up again -- can anyone from @github-staff comment?

[vincentsijben]

Just happened to 2 of my students as well. Different organisations... Hope its a bug and its fixed soon 😉

[Parsa-Rajabi]

Hey Vincent, have you thought about any work arounds for the current issue? (e.g. using a different platform?) These issues are making me re-think using GH Classroom moving forward...

[vincentsijben]

nah, just wait until its fixed 😉 hopefully within 24 hours 😆

[gbacon]

I was able to work around the problem by deleting the assignment repos created for the students who got the error and having them reaccept the assignment.

[nelsonlim]

Just happened to my students as well. While we can manually add students. It does become a pain on scale.

[Mitchman215]

Also is happening in our course for a lot of students, have to manually add

[Ujoa]

@github-staff

[lisamru]

Ran into this issue as well today for 2 students. They were able to access their first two assignments with no issues and could not access the third.

[lisamru]

Just had another section and another student is unable to access. Hopefully this is resolved by the time we have our official lab on Thursday!

[ekgibbons]

Same issue with my courses. It seems like any assignments that were accepted yesterday were okay. Anything that was accepted today ran into this issue.

[JoshIsomLehigh]

Several students successfully accepted assignments this morning, but as of several hours ago students report "when I try to accept the assignment on github it says that I no longer have access" I submitted a ticket at https://support.github.com/

[swnesbitt]

Is it possible to fix this without adding all of the students to the github org?

[tbartens]

I have I added all my students to my organization, but no invitations to join were sent to the students. I manually connected each student to a GitHub userid. Even though my organization shows that I have 66 students all in my roster, I still have the problem that GitHub treats these 66 students as "outside collaborators".  About 10-15% of my students get a "Pending Invitation" status even though no invitations were sent, and therefore cannot access their repositories.

I'm guessing that the single member teams assignment or creating an assignment with a single team of all students (mentioned in previous posts) forces invitations to get sent to the students so they are truly "members" of the organization, which fixes the problem?

So even with adding all the students to the github org does not completely solve the problem.

[nikmomo]

I received a response from GitHub support, saying, "This issue has been reported to our team. We do not currently have a timeline for a fix release."

I've developed a service that resolves this issue efficiently by automatically sending a new invitation after student accepted the assignment. It can be deployed on a server for responsive operation.
https://github.com/nikmomo/GHClassroom.AccessFix

[suhasdara]

If you don't want to set up an entire server, it might be easier to just set up github actions to run a reinvite script every couple of hours. So far this seems to be working well for me

[nikmomo]

If you don't want to set up an entire server, it might be easier to just set up github actions to run a reinvite script every couple of hours. So far this seems to be working well for me

That's a good idea!

[djholt]

It may do little good, but if you're unsatisfied with the current state of support with GitHub Education, please consider voicing your concern in this thread.

[dtaylor84]

AI slop

[SaadKhan000]

I wish Github would resolve this soon. I have spent hours manually removing and then adding students as collaborators. I have done this for 30+ students by now. I teach a class of roughly 60 students. My main concern though is the disruption caused to the flow of the course. I don't think GithHub fully understands the anxiety and panic this can cause for students - i.e., when their assignment is due soon, but they cannot access it. I have already given extentions for two of the assignments.

[nikmomo]

This is what Github replied:

[rohkud]

Essentially GitHub doesn't care that GitHub classroom does not work. Disappointed.

[SaadKhan000]

Seems like it. We are on our own and being asked to find work arounds.

[apzanagram]

Hi, I am having the same issue. https://github.com/github-staff, Can you please provide input on when a fix is expected?

[ekgibbons]

I ended up using a variant of that bash script posted earlier and put it in a GitHub action. I didn't want to have a delay, though, so for my scheduler, I set up webhooks that will trigger the action every time an assignment repo is created. It seems to be triggering correctly, but when I try to create a dummy assignment to try to accept, I don't have the error. Hopefully that remains the case. And, hopefully, if there are issues this hack catches the issue and fixes it for my students.

[neloe]

I've been trying to test a variety of fixes as well, and I'm pretty sure that we can't see the issues (even on dummy assignments) because we're owners on the organization. When we accept the assignment, we automatically get added to the contributors and the invites aren't issued (I checked this multiple times and thought I was losing my mind). It's made the testing feedback loop much too long to come up with a solution that works for all my students, because I do think there's something happening in the background, because it appears as of this morning some students are able to get in and do some assignments, but not all. I wonder if there's something with the specific repos that this is happening on that makes it more likely than for other repos.

I love the idea of adding the webhook as a github action. This has me thinking of a brand new horrible idea: I wonder if there's a way to set up a github action that runs when the repo is created that deletes the notification and resends it. That probably won't work without authentication secrets, and that's probably a bad idea, but right now any idea seems like progress

Good luck

[mihaelasabin]

What does it mean to manually delete the invitation for each student? Is it that in GitHub Classroom I delete their repos (which, in my case are never created)?
And what does it mean to manually add each student? Add to the org? As members? I rather prefer they are external collaborators.

[neloe]

If classroom isn't creating the repos, that's probably a different, odder issue. If the repositories get created and students see the error in the screen shot of the first post, you can go to the repository's "Collaborators and Teams" settings page and seeing if the student still has an invite pending. From that interface you can delete the invitation and re-invite them as a collaborator (so the invitation comes from you and not github-classroom[bot]) and they can accept the invitation. The biggest issues with this are it takes time to do this individually, and if they don't get the invite email (or don't check the email associated with their account) they don't have a functional link to the repository to accept the link. GitHub Classroom still shows the Repository Access Issue screen.

I wrote a quick little robovac like bash script that goes through the organization and looks for repos with outstanding invites. It's not code I'm proud of, I can see a bunch of ways it's going to break once we get past a week or two more of class, but it seems to correctly reissue the invites. This automates some of the pain, but not all of it. It does require the gh cli, python 3, and the repo-collab extension to the gh cli.
https://gist.github.com/neloe/0af28947e3b28018141c01751bdd0f0f
Use at your own risk; I'm still trying to work with students to see what is and isn't working, and since I'm the GitHub Campus Advisor for our unit, I'm trying to figure work with the few faculty who are still using GHCR to figure out a solution that's going to work as well as possible for all of us. This does keep them as external collaborators.

Good luck

[neloe]

Hey all, just a few observations that might help us figure out useful workarounds that we are "welcome to use".

• Deleting the repo and having them reaccept no longer seems to solve any problems; it did early on when this issue was starting to present itself.
• If I delete outstanding invitations created by the bot and reissue them with my credentials the students can get to the assignments BUT github classroom won't provide them a link. If they don't check their email for the invitation or it gets sent to spam, they are left with guessing the URL of their repository.

The second point is interesting to me; it means that the classroom interface isn't just checking to see if the student has an invite, but that the invite was issued by the bot (or the check to see if they have an invite/collaborator access is bugged. That seems equally likely). Normally students can go back to the classroom URL and get to their repo link again, but that doesn't seem to work with instructor issued invites.

I threw together a really quick and dirty hack that automates the second point: https://gist.github.com/neloe/0af28947e3b28018141c01751bdd0f0f
I'm not super proud of it, but it seems to accomplish something, so there's that. Feel free to play around with that. This morning half of the calls to the invites api were failing with a network unreachable. That could have been something with my home computer, but I really hope not.

I'm pondering a solution where instead of students accepting the repository, I bulk create the assignments and invites with GH CLI, then distribute the links to students, essentially circumventing the whole classroom interface. Based on past messing around I think the interface will still pick up their repositories and allow us to see them (much like you can have unit tests/github actions embedded as part of the base repo instead of writing them in the interface). I'm starting week 3 of a semester were over half of the students in over half of my classes can't even start the assignments, and I'll be honest, that's less than ideal.

I like the idea of the webhook services recommended above (both the typescript based one and the bash script that I missed while fielding support requests from students and faculty), but until I get out of triage mode testing and deploying (and hosting!) one of these kinds of solutions is more than I have mental bandwidth for.

I won't lie; I'm inches away from throwing in the towel and having them download a zip archive of their repository, take screenshots of their code running, and submit those. A better solution might be making them org members and creating their own forks. The downside to that is I don't want them to see all the assignments ahead of time, and I'd like them to not have their work visible to each other, so that's a whole other issue.

A big thanks to everyone who's been contributing ideas, workarounds (both working and non), and sharing advice and solutions. While I still feel like my classes using GHCR are pretty much screwed right now, it feels a little less overwhelming to be essentially crowdsourcing data collection on the issue.

[nikmomo]

Hey all, just a few observations that might help us figure out useful workarounds that we are "welcome to use".

• Deleting the repo and having them reaccept no longer seems to solve any problems; it did early on when this issue was starting to present itself.

• If I delete outstanding invitations created by the bot and reissue them with my credentials the students can get to the assignments BUT github classroom won't provide them a link. If they don't check their email for the invitation or it gets sent to spam, they are left with guessing the URL of their repository.

The second point is interesting to me; it means that the classroom interface isn't just checking to see if the student has an invite, but that the invite was issued by the bot (or the check to see if they have an invite/collaborator access is bugged. That seems equally likely). Normally students can go back to the classroom URL and get to their repo link again, but that doesn't seem to work with instructor issued invites.

I threw together a really quick and dirty hack that automates the second point: https://gist.github.com/neloe/0af28947e3b28018141c01751bdd0f0f

I'm not super proud of it, but it seems to accomplish something, so there's that. Feel free to play around with that. This morning half of the calls to the invites api were failing with a network unreachable. That could have been something with my home computer, but I really hope not.

I'm pondering a solution where instead of students accepting the repository, I bulk create the assignments and invites with GH CLI, then distribute the links to students, essentially circumventing the whole classroom interface. Based on past messing around I think the interface will still pick up their repositories and allow us to see them (much like you can have unit tests/github actions embedded as part of the base repo instead of writing them in the interface). I'm starting week 3 of a semester were over half of the students in over half of my classes can't even start the assignments, and I'll be honest, that's less than ideal.

I like the idea of the webhook services recommended above (both the typescript based one and the bash script that I missed while fielding support requests from students and faculty), but until I get out of triage mode testing and deploying (and hosting!) one of these kinds of solutions is more than I have mental bandwidth for.

I won't lie; I'm inches away from throwing in the towel and having them download a zip archive of their repository, take screenshots of their code running, and submit those. A better solution might be making them org members and creating their own forks. The downside to that is I don't want them to see all the assignments ahead of time, and I'd like them to not have their work visible to each other, so that's a whole other issue.

A big thanks to everyone who's been contributing ideas, workarounds (both working and non), and sharing advice and solutions. While I still feel like my classes using GHCR are pretty much screwed right now, it feels a little less overwhelming to be essentially crowdsourcing data collection on the issue.

When you inviting students manually. They actually will have an invitation email. By clicking view invitation and then they can see the repo

[neloe]

When you inviting students manually. They actually will have a invitation email. By clicking view invitation and then they can see the repo

This is true, but I still get the "I didn't get the invitation" email/question a lot. Whether they're just checking the wrong email or it got filtered to spam... one of the biggest benefits of the acceptance process was it put the URL of their repository was front and center after the repo was created.

It looks like there's maybe a way to see all open invitations, which I'm going to try in class today: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/22529

I've never been able to see open invitations this way, but I've also never tried when I know I had open invites.

[catherine-leung]

• Each github classroom is associated with a github organization.
• Go to your organization, you will find a people tab on my ui it goes:
  overview-->repositories -->project-->packages -->team-->people
  Then on the left hand panel of when you are in people tab, you will see organization permissions box and it will list how many members, outside collaborators etc.
  For me I found that the correct one to look at was the Pending collaborators... Each pending collaborator had an invitation according to my org/repo but their actual invitations were invalid. The fix is to remove them from the repo then add then invite them again.

[lingdoc]

This suddenly started happening to me this semester with all assignments. This is the 6th time I'm running the course and when I look at "people" in my team settings, I noticed that in the previous semesters each student was automatically added as a 'member' of my organization, but this semester they're being added as 'outside collaborators'. I think this might be related to the fact that all student repositories are now forked instead of being copied, as they were previously.

The fact that nearly all new invitations are failing now is concerning. I'm wondering if inviting all the students to join the organization first is the way to go.

[catherine-leung]

A workaround that we are doing that seems to work is to create group assignments with a group size of 1. When students join a group assignment they get added to the org as a member of the org, not as outside collaborator. If you name the set of teams the same as the first in later assignments they don't even need to type in a new team name.

[lingdoc]

so, just to clarify, I create a single group assignment with a group size of 1, then share the same link with all students? Or do I need to create a single group assignment for each student?

[sjgoebel]

I've used GitHub Classroom going back to the 2017-2018 academic year. I've never had students get added automatically as members of my organizations, but I've never used group assignments (which I believe do add students as members). I only had this particular issue pop up for the first time last week. Just this morning, assignment links for a re-created assignment appear to be working again.

Assignments being forks was a change a year or two ago (I forget exactly when this was done) to address teachers not being able to modify starter code once an assignment link was clicked.

[catherine-leung]

so, just to clarify, I create a single group assignment with a group size of 1, then share the same link with all students? Or do I need to create a single group assignment for each student?

An assignment is just a repository creation link. When you create an assignment, you are basically providing a quick and easy way for students to create a repository that is under the control of your organization. The rules around who has access to that repository depends on the type of assignment and how you configure that assignment.

The first thing that happens when you create an assignment is that it asks you about the configuration.. individual vs groups, max number of groups, max number of students per group, if you want starter files etc. This creates that classroom link that you give to the student. Depending on your config, the link will then allow students who accept the assignment to join the appropriate repository.

Here is a guide that I have written up: https://seneca-ictoer.github.io/githubteachingtools/. it goes a bit more in depth. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

[neloe]

Update: I could be one of the lucky ones, but I just had a room of students (admittedly a smaller number than I'd like) accept all their assignments for the week and it let them in. I don't know if anything changed under the hood or anyone with an open ticket has heard back on it or not. Invites issued over the weekend still didn't work, but they could access their list of open invites by going to https://github.com/settings/organizations which meant any invites I reissued over the weekend could be accepted. These are all assignment links created 3 ish weeks ago (I tried to get my course infrastructure set up before the semester started), so I don't know if the timing of the assignment creation matters.

I'm going to try with another group in an hour, but hopefully this is a sign of less bad things. Hopefully it's not a case of "who gets the working instance of GitHub today".

[sjgoebel]

I just had this work for me as well. An assignment worked the week before last, but it was not working for my students on Friday of last week.

[catherine-leung]

A large number of people had filed tickets to github asking for support.. maybe they fixed whatever back end issue was messing up the assignment creation :). Good news in any case.

Cathy

[CraigGroup]

60 students all got into their repo today in my class. Yay!

[jaydesl]

I had 100+ students on a new assignment today without issue, so looks like a fix may have been applied? Let's hope!

[carlinrosengarten]

So they just need to go to github.com/settings/organizations and they will see their assignments there?

[ctnelson1997]

Hi all, I was able to have 100+ students all successfully accept the assignment today. I ended up removing the old assignment link and created a new one for all to use.

Would really appreciate comment and communication from @github-staff on this matter, though. This has caused many instructors and students heartache over the last week, and the only communication I've received is from other instructors.

[catherine-leung]

I thought that if you use classroom to manage access to enterprise cloud organizations, your students will also need an enterprise cloud account. This was what my the people who admin the enterprise cloud at our school says. There are a lot of things I'm not clear about when it comes to using classroom with enterprise cloud though.. would love to know what your experience with that has been as I've been considering moving things there.

[mihaelasabin]

According to GitHub documentation and policies: GitHub Classroom with a GitHub Enterprise Cloud organization allow sstudents to accept invitations with their personal GitHub accounts. This is a standard and supported configuration, provided your enterprise account uses personal accounts rather than Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs). I don't know why this doesn't work for my students anymore.

[catherine-leung]

Any chance this was a change at your enterprise cloud admin level where they disabled the use of personal accounts? (your school's system admins enabled enterprise managed users on their end). I think this may be something that we did but I was never using enterprise so didn't face the situation personally. I just know that students can't use their school emails for personal accounts anymore where they use to be able to

[mihaelasabin]

I'm the admin of the GitHub enterprise cloud. Allowing personal user accounts is done only at the organization or repository level. Again, nothing is changed from what I have done in the past. However, students cannot accept the classroom assignment invites anymore.

[catherine-leung]

Ah .. that is cool. I was told that I could only add other people with enterprise cloud accounts into my org. I need to investigate using enterprise cloud more. Thanks for letting me know what to ask for :). Hope your issue gets looked at though. Sucks when things don't work right.

[suhasdara]

I see this thread has died down for now. For when this ultimately becomes a problem again (since GitHub does not care about it), I created a template repository that can be cloned and edited to be a GitHub Actions workflow that sends reinvites to students. It was not tested explicitly, but adapted from working scripts by Claude Code.

_{There is a good chance you have to fix things before it works correctly}
https://github.com/suhasdara/github-classroom-reinvitation

We moved on from GitHub classroom mid-semester due to these issues. Maybe this is what GitHub wants so that they can shelve the project.

[norandomtechie]

Is anyone else's students getting HTTP 500 errors just trying to accept the GitHub Classroom invitation?

[ctnelson1997]

Getting a 500 when even trying to login to GitHub Classroom...

[beak85]

Yes

[swnesbitt]

Yes at UIUC, frustrating - we also suffered from the earlier issue.

[mikesmithlab]

I wanted to share a solution that I will be using for my course. Many of the fixes I've seen involve scripts trying to fix permissions after the student has tried clicking on the github classroom link. The drawback with that is that the students get refused entry to repo, you then have to keep running a script to change permissions and allow them access.

This approach creates their repo and modifies the permissions before I then send them the usual github classroom link. Now when they click on it they should have no issues because repo and permissions are already setup correctly. I can run this for all the assignments in my course at the beginning of term and forget about everything. This approach needs you to know the students github id. I plan to send out a welcome email asking them to register for a github account and then fill in a microsoft form with name, email and github id.

I have an excel file with names, github id and emails from the form. I also had to set up a personal access token (its in Github Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens. Choose Tokens (classic ). Select the repo checkbox and generate the PAT. I then have that in a .json file containing {'API_KEY': pat code}

Once I've collected github ids I then run a python script which interacts with github api. It can be rerun as it won't overwrite student repos that have been created previously or change permissions for students that have already been modified.

You need to set:
a) your ORGNAME,
b) path to the file with PAT,
c) path to student excel file,
d) the assignment name (This is what you called it in github classroom),
e) assignment_template (This is the name of the template repo used to create the assignment)

Then you should be able to run this python script.

Finally, send out the links for github classroom assignments as usual.

import requests
import json
import time
import pandas as pd
import os

# =========================
# CONFIGURATION
# =========================

username = os.environ['USERNAME']

# path to key files
credentials = 'PATH/TO/KEY/github_classroom_api_key.json'
student_list = 'PATH/TO/STUDENTLIST/students2526.xlsx'

# Your GitHub organization name
ORG = "ORGNAME"

# The timeout for all API requests in seconds
REQUEST_TIMEOUT = 10

# =========================
# SCRIPT START
# =========================

# Load Personal Access Token (PAT) from a JSON file
try:
    with open(credentials, 'r') as f:
        config = json.load(f)
        PAT = config['API_KEY']
except FileNotFoundError:
    print(f"Error: The file 'github_classroom_api_key.json' was not found at '{credentials}'.")
    exit()


# Headers for all API requests
HEADERS = {
    "Authorization": f"token {PAT}",
    "Accept": "application/vnd.github.v3+json",
}

# Load student data from the Excel file
try:
    df = pd.read_excel(student_list)
    student_usernames = df['github id'].tolist()
except FileNotFoundError:
    print("Error: The file 'students2526.xlsx' was not found. Please make sure it is in the same directory.")
    exit()


#Go into assignment on github classroom and retrieve these
assignment_name = ASSIGNMENT NAME
forked_repo_url = "https://api.github.com/repos/" + ORG + "/" + assignment_template + '/forks'


for student_username in student_usernames:
    print(f"Processing student {student_username}...")
    repo_name = assignment_name.replace(" ", "-") + '-' + student_username

    # Check if repository exists
    repo_url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{ORG}/{repo_name}"
    try:
        #-----------------------------------------------------------
        #If the repo already exists but student doesn't have access
        #-------------------------------------------------------------
        response = requests.get(repo_url, headers=HEADERS, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT)
        response.raise_for_status()

        # Check if collaborator exists
        collab_url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{ORG}/{repo_name}/collaborators/{student_username}"
        permission_url = f"{collab_url}/permission"
        
        permission_response = requests.get(permission_url, headers=HEADERS, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT)

        if permission_response.status_code == 200:
            permission_data = permission_response.json()
            print(f"  -> Collaborator '{student_username}' is already on the repo with '{permission_data['permission']}' permission. Skipping.")
        elif permission_response.status_code == 404:
            print(f"  -> Collaborator not found. Adding '{student_username}'...")
            add_collab_data = {"permission": "push"}
            requests.put(collab_url, data=json.dumps(add_collab_data), headers=HEADERS, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT)
            print("  -> Collaborator added.")
        else:
            print(f"  -> Unexpected error checking collaborator: {permission_response.status_code} - {permission_response.json()}")
    
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as e:
        if e.response.status_code == 404:
            print(f"  -> Repository '{repo_name}' not found. Forking it from template...")
            # Use the /forks endpoint to create a fork of the template repo in the organization
            forked_repo_data = {
                "organization": ORG,
                "name": repo_name 
            }
            create_response = requests.post(forked_repo_url, data=json.dumps(forked_repo_data), headers=HEADERS, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT)
            
            if create_response.status_code == 202:
                print(f"  -> Successfully forked repository '{repo_name}'.")
                
                # Adding a small delay to ensure the repo is ready for the next API call
                time.sleep(2)
                
                print(f"  -> Adding '{student_username}' as a collaborator to the new repo.")
                add_collab_url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{ORG}/{repo_name}/collaborators/{student_username}"
                add_collab_data = {"permission": "push"}
                requests.put(add_collab_url, data=json.dumps(add_collab_data), headers=HEADERS, timeout=REQUEST_TIMEOUT)
                print("  -> Collaborator added.")
            else:
                print(f"  -> Failed to fork repository: {create_response.status_code} - {create_response.json()}")

        else:
            print(f"  -> An HTTP error occurred: {e}")
    
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print(f"  -> An error occurred: {e}")

print("Script finished.")