[GSOC'26] Template Playground: Persistent Template Playground

[JiyaGupta-cs]

Problem

The current template playground is stateless. When users leave or refresh the page, all progress is lost. This breaks real-world authoring workflows where lawyers and contract managers expect to pause, revisit, iterate their work over time.

Additionally, maintaining persistence via a traditional database introduces infrastructure cost, operational overhead, and reduced openness, which goes against the goal of keeping the product open-source and lightweight.

Proposed Solution

• Authentication: Allow users to sign in (e.g., GitHub OAuth).
• Save & Resume: Provide an explicit “Save” option so users can persist their playground state and continue later.
• Storage via GitHub:
  - Use Octokit.js to interact with GitHub APIs.
  - Use SimpleGit on the backend to manage commits.
  - Automatically create or use a private repository under the user’s GitHub account.
  - All implementation details are abstracted - users only need a GitHub account, no Git knowledge required

Outcomes

• Users can save, resume, and continue their work seamlessly across sessions.
• No work is lost; every save is versioned, enabling easy rollback to any previous state.
• The product remains open-source, with no dependency on a managed database.
• Zero Git complexity for users - all repository, commit, and version handling is fully automated.
• Strong user trust and data ownership, since work is stored in the user’s own GitHub account.
• Improved productivity and user retention, as users can pause and return without friction.

Alternatives to Explore

• GitHub Gists for lighter-weight persistence.
• Client-side storage (IndexedDB) for unauthenticated users.

Skills required/preferred:

React.js, OctoKit.js, SimpleGit

Possible Mentors:

Matt Roberts, Dan Selman

Expected size of project:

175 hours (medium)

Expected difficulty:

Medium

[sanketshevkar]

Thanks @JiyaGupta-cs

This sounds awesome, this could be helpful for the users to persist and more importantly share templates. We have quite a few of ideas for template-playground, we may see if we could add this up with other things we want to do with it. Adding this support with Template-Archive is something we could look into.

To sponsor a project we have problem of prioritisation due limited resources in terms mentors and their time. We'll I'll surely bring this up during our ideas list finalisation.

Thanks!