Setting up a curriculum repository
As a mentor you're usually working with a fork — your own copy of a curriculum, paired with the apprentice you're mentoring. Install the same app the apprentice uses first — Installing the app — then clone from More as below.
Cloning and remotes
Use Clone repository from More with a GitHub or GitLab HTTPS URL, the same way an apprentice does. If you'll be pushing reviews, you need a personal access token with read and write access to repository contents (plus metadata read) — nothing broader. Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, and Administration scopes are unnecessary and should not be granted.
A fork typically tracks two remotes: origin — your (and your apprentice's) working copy, and upstream — the canonical curriculum you forked from.
You can fetch upstream, preview what changed, and merge those curriculum updates into your fork without losing anything your apprentice has already written — the app treats curriculum files and personal overlay files as separately owned, so an upstream curriculum update never clobbers a reflection or a submission.
What stays private in a fork
Only two folders ever hold personal data:
- •The apprentice's own personal folder — profile, task state, reflection, evidence, notes, work log, submissions.
- •The mentor's own personal folder — reviews, and eventually mentor notes.
Everything else — the curriculum manifest, the curriculum content itself, resources, competencies, schemas, and the curriculum's own docs folder — is shareable curriculum content, not personal data.
"Personal" here means ownership — the app never writes an apprentice's data into a mentor's folder or the reverse. It does not by itself mean the repository is confidential: if you're on GitHub and got this repository by forking a public one, that fork — and your personal folder inside it — is public too, by a GitHub platform rule apprenti.dev has no control over. See Keeping your fork private if that's not what you want.
The app never publishes a fork for you, and it never strips these folders automatically. If you or your apprentice ever intend to share this repository more widely — as a public example, say — remove the apprentice and mentor personal-data folders from the working tree first. Deleting them is only the minimum: Git history can still contain earlier copies until you start a fresh repository or rewrite history yourself.
Ownership boundaries, in short
- Curriculum content (manifest, tasks, resources, competencies, schemas) — curator/upstream-owned, shareable.
- The apprentice's personal folder — apprentice overlay, never a base.
- The mentor's personal folder — mentor overlay, never a base.
The app is designed to never silently overwrite either side during a sync — conflicts always surface for a human decision.