The Distributed Open Education Network (Doenet) is an open data-driven educational technology platform designed to measure and share student interactions with web pages. It includes tools for authoring interactive educational content, including our custom DoenetML markup language, and conducting educational research using the content. Our ultimate goal is to provide research-based tools to help instructors and learners discover the most effective content. Simply put, Doenet gives teachers complete flexibility over their educational content and gives them power of anonymized student data to track learning outcomes. With Doenet, we hope to help teachers teach better and students learn better.

Although we are still in the early stages, we are excited to introduce Doenet and illustrate the richly interactive activities that one can author with it.

For more background and information on the Doenet project, see this MAA DUE Point article.

We would love to hear from you! Join our Discord to ask questions and stay updated on our progress!

• Node.js 24+
• Docker (for the MySQL database)

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Doenet/DoenetTools.git
cd DoenetTools

2. Install dependencies

npm install

3. Create the .env file

npm run setup

This copies apps/api/.env.example to apps/api/.env. The defaults work for local development, but edit as needed (e.g. change DATABASE_HOST, DATABASE_PORT, or DATABASE_PASSWORD if your MySQL setup differs — and update DATABASE_URL to match).

4. Start the database

docker compose --env-file apps/api/.env up -d

Wait until the MySQL container shows (healthy) in docker container ls before continuing.

5. Setup the database tables

npm run db:setup

This creates the required database tables and seeds them with minimal data.

6. Build the shared package

The shared package must be built before starting the dev servers:

npm run build --workspace @doenet-tools/shared

7. Start the dev servers

Run each in its own terminal:

npm run dev --workspace @doenet-tools/api   # Express API → http://localhost:3000
npm run dev --workspace @doenet-tools/app   # React SPA  → http://localhost:8000
npm run dev --workspace @doenet-tools/web   # Astro site  → http://localhost:4321

The app dev server proxies /api/* to the API, so both must be running for the full app to work.

This repository is an npm workspace monorepo. Packages are organized into two directories:

• apps/ — runnable applications (each has a dev server or build output intended to be deployed or run directly)
• packages/ — shared libraries and internal tooling consumed by the apps