Website | Getting started | Documentation

Hi there! Are you an educator looking for a way to start your own online teaching website or business? Have you been to the sites which let you start your own online classes but charge a lot or take a lot commission but you don't want to give away a significant amount of your income to those businesses? Then you are at the right place.

Using CourseLit, which is a content management system (also known as a CMS) specially designed for educators and teachers, you can easily host your own courses on any cheap cloud based server, something like a $5/month droplet on Digitalocean for example.

CourseLit comes pre-equipped with all the basic tools you'd require to efficiently run and administer your online teaching business. Features include student management, payment processing (via Stripe), customization and analytics (very limited as of now).

Check out a live example to see what you can build with CourseLit. Click here.

The recommended way to deploy CourseLit on your server is via Ansible. Follow the below mentioned instructions.

ansible-playbook deployment/install.yml -l <host> -u <host_user> --ask-become-pass -e 'ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3'

ansible-playbook deployment/install-without-ssl.yml -l <host> -u <host_user> --ask-become-pass -e 'ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3'

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS versions.

If the above Ansible installer fails, retry the operation after deleting the media folder from the server which you specified while running the installer. The default location is ~/courselit-data.

You can run a local instance of CourseLit on your local machine via Docker Compose. Follow the below mentioned instructions.

1. Cd to the deployment folder.

cd courselit/deployment

2. Create a .env file in this directory with the following variables and change the values as per your environment.

SITE_URL=http://localhost
MEDIA_FOLDER=~/courselit
MONGO_ROOT_USERNAME=username
MONGO_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
DB_CONNECTION_STRING=mongodb://username:password@db
JWT_SECRET=yoursecret
JWT_EXPIRES_IN=2d

3. Start the application.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up

4. Visit http://localhost in your browser.

SITE_URL

The public address of the site. Required parameter. No default value.

MEDIA_FOLDER

A folder on your host machine while will be mounted as a volume to all the containers. It is required for storing database files, user uploaded files, ssl certificates and everything else. Required parameter. No default value.

MONGO_ROOT_USERNAME, MONGO_ROOT_PASSWORD

These are required for correctly initializing an admin user in the mongo db instance running inside the container named db. Read more about these here.

DB_CONNECTION_STRING

The connection string to a mongodb instance running in the db container. Required parameter. The value should be mongodb://<MONGO_ROOT_USERNAME>:<MONGO_ROOT_PASSWORD>@db where MONGO_ROOT_USERNAME and MONGO_ROOT_PASSWORD are the same variables defined above.

JWT_SECRET

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

JWT_EXPIRES_IN

The duration after while the generated JWT expires. For more information check out here. Optional parameter. Defaults to 1d.

DOMAIN

The domain name for which the ssl certificate is issued. Optional parameter, only required if using a SSL certificate. No default value.

Although, we've done everything in our power to secure the application by following the best practices, we hope you understand that no one can guarantee that it's the most secure implementation out there and it will always stay secure.

Please audit the environment files, docker-compose files and other configurations properly as per your company's security standards. If you've discovered a security vulnerability, consider fixing the issue and submitting a PR.

Use the application at your own risk. People who have worked on this project will not be responsible for any sort of damage that happens to you by using the application.