// the find
gazpachu/hypatia
A JavaScript open source LMS (eLearning platform) for MOOCs and online courses
Hypatia is a React/Redux SPA for running online courses, backed entirely by Firebase (Realtime Database + Auth + Storage). It covers the basics: course structure with subjects and modules, student grades, a chat component, and an admin panel for managing content. The author explicitly says it's in hibernation and not production-ready, which should be the first thing you read before anything else.
The course hierarchy (courses → subjects → modules → pages) is modeled cleanly and maps well to how real curricula are structured. Firebase handles auth, storage, and real-time sync without any backend code, which makes the initial setup genuinely simple for someone who just wants to prototype an LMS. The theming layer (everything under src/app/themes/nekomy/) is separated from core logic, which at least signals intent for customization. The demo-data.json import path means you can have a working demo instance in under an hour.
This hasn't been touched since February 2023 and uses Node >= 7.4.0 as its baseline — the whole dependency tree is three years of security debt waiting to happen. The Firebase Realtime Database lock-in is total: there's no abstraction layer, so migrating to anything else means rewriting data access everywhere. Admin privilege is granted by manually setting a 'level: 5' field in the Firebase console, which is the kind of access control that gets exploited. No video hosting or content delivery story — you're expected to figure that out yourself, and for an LMS that's the hard part.