📚 Note Forge

Empowering students and educators with organized knowledge

📊 Project	⚡ Tech Stack	🤝 Community

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Table of Contents

• 🎯 The Problem & Solution
• ✨ Key Features
• 👥 Who Is This For
• 🚧 Project Status & Roadmap
• 🛠️ Tech Stack
• ⚡ Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Manual Installation
  • Docker Installation
• 🗂️ Project Structure
• 🤝 Contributions

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The Problem & Solution

The Challenge

Students and educators often struggle with:

• 📚 Scattered Materials: Practice problems spread across PDFs, websites, and notebooks.
• 🔍 Poor Organization: Hard to find specific exercises when you need them.
• ⏰ Time-Consuming Setup: Manually organizing materials takes time away from actual learning.

The Solution

Note Forge makes educational content management easy:

• 🎯 Unified Platform: All exercises, categories, and study materials in one place.
• 🏷️ Smart Organization: Tag-based system with custom categories for quick retrieval.
• ⚡ Quick Setup: Get organized in minutes, not hours.

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Who Is This For?

Students 👨‍🎓

Keep your study materials, guides, and exercises neatly organized in categories — no more scattered files!

Educators 👩‍🏫

Reuse exercises you’ve already created by storing them in Note Forge, and export new study material in PDF format.

Teaching Assistants 👨‍💼

Quickly generate study materials with LaTeX styling, perfect for preparing exercises on demand.

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Key Features

📝 Exercise Management

• Create & Customize: Text editor with LaTeX support for mathematical expressions
• Smart Tagging: Organize with custom tags, difficulty levels, and time estimates
• Quick Search: Find exercises instantly by title, tags, or content

📁 Custom Categories

• Flexible Organization: Create subject-based, difficulty-based, or custom taxonomies
• Visual Categories: Add images and descriptions to make browsing intuitive
• Pin Important: Mark frequently-used categories for quick access

📚 Study Guide Generator (Working on it)

• Adaptive Selection: Generate guides based on difficulty progression
• Time-Based Sessions: Create study sessions fitting your available time
• Export Options: Generate PDFs for offline studying

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Project Status & Roadmap

• 📅 Started: January 2025
• 💻 Active Development: Yes
• 📝 Documentation: Continuously updated

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🚧 Current Work

Feature	Status
UI/UX Redesign	🟡 50%
API & UI Testing	🟡 50%
Documentation	🟡 50%

📋 Backlog

Feature	Priority
Responsive Layout	🔸 Medium
Error Handling	🔸 Medium

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Tech Stack

🎨 Frontend

• React 18 + Vite
• TailwindCSS

⚙️ Backend

• Node.js (Express)
• MySQL 8.0+

🐳 Infrastructure

• Docker/Podman

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

Make sure you have these installed:

• ✅ Node.js v22.x+
• ✅ MySQL 8.0+
• 🐳 Docker/Podman (optional)

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Manual Installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/xhandlr/note-forge.git

cd note-forge

2. Set up the database

Make sure MySQL is running, then log into your MySQL client and execute the script located a db/init.sql.

3. Configure environment variables

cp note-forge-api/.env.example note-forge-api/.env

Edit the new .env file and update your DB credentials and JWT_SECRET.

4. Start the backend

cd note-forge-api

npm install

node index.js

By default, the API will run at: http://localhost:5000

5. Start the frontend

cd ../note-forge-ui

npm install

npm run dev

Access the app at: http://localhost:5173

Docker Installation

If you prefer to run the app using containers:

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/xhandlr/note-forge.git

cd note-forge

2. Start services with Docker Compose

docker-compose up -d

This will start:

• MySQL with initial schema

• Backend API

• Frontend UI

Visit http://localhost:5173 to use the app.

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Project Structure

📦 Monorepo Structure

note-forge/
┣━━ 🗃️  db/                     ← Database scripts (SQL files)
┃
┣━━ ⚡ note-forge-api/          ← Backend service
┃   ┣━━ config/                 ← App configuration
┃   ┣━━ controllers/            ← Request handlers
┃   ┣━━ services/               ← Business logic
┃   ┣━━ models/                 ← Data models
┃   ┗━━ routes/                 ← API endpoints
┃
┣━━ 🎨 note-forge-ui/           ← Frontend client
┃   ┣━━ src/components/         ← React components
┃   ┣━━ src/pages/              ← Application views
┃
┗━━ 🐳 docker-compose.yml       ← Container config

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Contributions

Contributions, bug reports, and feature suggestions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.