Introduction

A headless CMS for hosting your own teaching courses. Features include course creation, student management, media management and website customisation. Learn more.

Getting started

Easily spin up a new CourseLit headless server using the following command.

export USER_CONTENT_DIRECTORY=local_directory_to_hold_user_data
export JWT_SECRET=string_of_your_choice
yarn start

# the server will be available at http://localhost/api

The above commands assume that you have a MongoDB server running on your local machine. If that is not the case, specify the DB_CONNECTION_STRING environment as well.

Additionally, you need to have imagemagick and ffmpeg softwares installed locally for media upload functionality to work.

Environment variables

USER_CONTENT_DIRECTORY

The CourseLit server needs a place to store user created content like media uploads. You can specify that location by setting this environment variable. Required parameter. No default value.

JWT_SECRET

A random string to use as a secret to sign the JWT tokens the API generates. Required parameter. No default value.

DB_CONNECTION_STRING

The connection string to a remote mongodb instance. Defaults to mongodb://localhost/app.

PORT

The port to run the server on. Defaults to 80.

API_PREFIX

This will make the server available at /<API_PREFIX> path. Defaults to /api.

JWT_EXPIRES_IN

The duration after while the generated JWT expires. For more information click this link. Defaults to 1d.

USE_WEBP If this is set to true, the app will convert the image being uploaded to WEBP format. The generated thumbnail will be a WEBP file as well.

WEBP_QUALITY The quality of output while converting images to WEBP format. Only applies when USE_WEBP is set to true. Defaults to 75.

Support

Come chat with us in our official Spectrum chat.