workshopper

Workshopper is an open-source framework for building interactive, command-line tutorials and workshops. It provides a lightweight, extensible structure for delivering self-guided learning experiences that present a sequence of exercises and assess user input.

In practice, authors define an exercise as a collection of steps. Each step contains an instructional prompt, an expected outcome, and a check script that verifies the learner’s solution. The framework runs in the terminal, displays prompts, and tracks progress across steps. It can offer hints or reveal solutions on request, and it provides asynchronous checks that give immediate feedback on user submissions.

Workshopper is designed as a modular ecosystem. The core library handles orchestration and user interaction, while additional modules supply exercise definitions, reporting, and UI enhancements. This design enables a wide range of tutorials to be built on top of it. Notable tutorials in the ecosystem include those from Node School, such as learnyounode, which use workshopper as their underlying structure. The ecosystem also includes related packages that help define exercises and adventures in a reusable way.

Usage typically involves installing the framework from npm and composing an exercise with JavaScript objects or JSON to declare its steps, prompts, and check logic. It is platform-agnostic and intended for use in the command line, making it suitable for self-contained programming courses and other hands-on curricula.

See also: Node School, learnyounode, howtonode, workshopper-exercise.