CHT Studio

Warning

Work in Progress — Early Open Source Release
CHT Studio is currently under active development as part of an academic Master's thesis.
Features, structure, and APIs may change without notice.
Contributions, feedback, and curiosity are very welcome — but please expect incomplete functionality and frequent updates. Feedback and contributions are warmly welcome!

A desktop application for building, testing, and managing Community Health Toolkit (CHT) applications locally.

No more fumbling with Excel sheets, no more testing JS in production after 'it worked on my machine'

CHT Studio provides a graphical interface to configure and preview CHT projects without requiring a running CHT server. It’s designed to help developers, researchers, and implementers prototype forms, contacts, and tasks faster — all from their desktop.

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Features

• Project management

  • Organize multiple CHT projects locally.

• Graphical Form Builder

  • Create and test CHT forms visually.
  • Creates forms as JSON and (locally testable) XForm XML.

• Base settings editor

  • Configure contact types with create/edit forms.
  • Work in progress.

• Task editor

  • Define and parse tasks to JavaScript.
  • Work in progress.

• CHT app export

  • Bundle a ready-to-run CHT app.
  • Planned feature.

• Local testing environment

  • Simulate and validate full CHT apps offline.
  • Planned feature.

• Git integration

  • Sync and deploy app versions automatically via Git.

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Repository Structure

studio/
├── package.json          # Root project definition
├── Cargo.toml            # Rust dependencies for Tauri backend
├── src-tauri/            # Tauri + Rust backend
│   └── src/lib.rs        # Custom Rust commands callable from the frontend
├── src/                  # Vite + React + TypeScript frontend
│   ├── components/
│   ├── pages/
│   └── main.tsx
└── packages/             # Standalone sub-apps used by Studio
    ├── formbuilder/      # CHT form builder
    ├── xform-runner/     # Enketo-based form previewer
    └── others/           # Supporting modules

Each packages/* directory is a self-contained application that can also run independently — useful for isolated development and testing.

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Contributing

Contributions are very welcome — whether documentation, refactoring, or new features. Please note: CHT Studio is part of a Master’s Thesis project, so merge timing and feature priorities might occasionally follow academic milestones.

You can:

• Open issues for bugs, ideas, or feedback.
• Create pull requests for fixes or enhancements.
• Improve docs and examples to help others onboard faster.

A full CONTRIBUTING.md with coding and branching guidelines will follow soon.

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Local Setup

Prerequisites

• Rust (via rustup recommended)
• Node.js
• pnpm

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Astrozyt/studio
cd cht-studio

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

Development

In the project root

# Run the full Tauri desktop app
pnpm tauri dev

# Run only the frontend in browser mode (limited, no file access)
pnpm dev

In a sub-package (e.g. /packages/formbuilder)

pnpm install
pnpm dev

Running packages individually is ideal for focused development and faster iteration.

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Roadmap

• Complete contact & task editors
• Add CHT app export pipeline
• Enable local simulation & validation
• Integrate GitOps-based remote deployment
• Publish Tauri bundles for all platforms

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License

Choose one: MIT / Apache-2.0 / MPL-2.0 — to be added soon.

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Credits

Built with ❤️ by @Astrozyt and contributors. Inspired by the incredible work of the Community Health Toolkit community.

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