Ansari

The most accurate, most helpful, free, open-source Islamic question-answering application.

Ansari answers Islamic questions with evidence: it searches the Quran, Hadith collections, the Kuwaiti Encyclopedia of Islamic Jurisprudence (Mawsuah), and Quranic exegesis (Tafsir), then synthesizes a cited, well-supported answer.

This is the Ansari monorepo, maintained by IASER (the Islamic Alliance for Safe, Ethical, and Responsible AI).

Layout

Directory	Contents
apps/api/	The production backend: Next.js API, Gemini-powered facilitator, Islamic search tools
apps/frontend/	The Ansari app: Expo / React Native (iOS, Android, and web via react-native-web)
docs/	Documentation, including the self-hosting guide

This is a pnpm workspace driven by Turborepo: one pnpm install at the repo root installs every package against the single root pnpm-lock.yaml, and root tasks (pnpm dev, pnpm lint, pnpm typecheck, pnpm test, pnpm build) fan out across the workspace through one cached task graph.

Quickstart

corepack enable        # provides pnpm (version pinned in package.json)
pnpm install           # once, at the repo root

# One-time backend setup — from the repo root
cd apps/api
cp .env.example .env   # fill in — see docs/self-hosting.md for the full contract
pnpm db:migrate
cd ../..

# Then, from the repo root: starts the API, the auth service and the app
# (auth needs its own one-time setup: see CONTRIBUTING.md)
pnpm dev

pnpm dev needs a real terminal (it uses Turbo's interactive UI so the Expo keypress shortcuts keep working). For a single app: pnpm api dev, pnpm auth dev, or pnpm frontend web for the web target; pnpm dev:no-auth skips the auth service.

See docs/self-hosting.md for prerequisites, the complete environment-variable contract, and deployment notes.

Contributing

Ansari is a Codev project: development follows the Codev methodology of AI-assisted engineering, with specs, plans, and reviews versioned in codev/. Developing with Codev is strongly recommended — see CONTRIBUTING.md to get started, and its Codev section for working from a fork.

Security issues: see SECURITY.md — please do not open public issues for vulnerabilities.

License

MIT © IASER