Prashna

How prashna runs a session with an audience: an admin sets it up, a moderator runs the room, participants join on their phones and the projector shows the room the same state. Questions are asked and upvoted, versioned quizzes are run question by question, and the session ends with ranked questions, quiz results, run reports, attendee profiles and feedback. The infographic source is kept with the image.

A live Q&A and quiz tool for any session with an audience: training, lectures, workshops, town halls, meetups. Prashna (प्रश्न) is Sanskrit for question.

Two core features:

• Anonymous Q&A. Participants post questions and upvote each other's. The moderator responds in text or out loud. A removed question is hidden from participants and kept for the record.
• Moderator-run quizzes. Single- or multiple-choice questions, optional images, anonymous answers, results revealed one question at a time, a lobby screen on the projector, and optional live counts while people answer. Quizzes are versioned: editing a quiz never changes the report of a past run.

A projector view for the screen at the front of the room shows the join code, a QR code for the participant link, the top questions, and the current quiz question in step with the moderator.

Install

Choose one of these. Each installs the same prashna command.

One command, on macOS, Linux, or Windows. Works on a machine without Python; it installs uv, which fetches Python if needed.

curl -LsSf https://kvsankar.github.io/prashna/install.sh | sh                  # macOS / Linux
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://kvsankar.github.io/prashna/install.ps1 | iex"   # Windows

Already have Python 3.11 or newer? Install without uv, using pipx:

pipx install prashna

Or use pip inside a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv ~/.prashna
~/.prashna/bin/pip install prashna          # Windows: ~\.prashna\Scripts\pip install prashna

A plain pip install into the system Python is refused on Debian, Ubuntu, and some other Linux distributions ("externally-managed-environment"); the virtual environment avoids that.

Already have uv? uvx prashna installs and starts it in one step.

Then start it:

prashna                                     # virtual environment: ~/.prashna/bin/prashna

Update with uv tool upgrade prashna, pipx upgrade prashna, or ~/.prashna/bin/pip install --upgrade prashna. prashna --help lists the options: port, data folder, and backups.

First run

prashna serves on http://127.0.0.1:8000 and opens your browser on a one-time page where you choose the admin's username and password. The page works once. After that, sign in to create sessions and write quizzes. Prashna keeps its data in your app-data folder.

Share over the internet

To let people join from their own phones over the internet, start Prashna with a tunnel:

prashna --tunnel cloudflare      # Cloudflare quick tunnel: no account needed
prashna --tunnel ngrok           # ngrok: uses your signed-in ngrok

Prashna starts the tunnel, waits until its public address works, and prints it (Participants join at: https://…). Participant links and the projector's QR code use that address automatically, while you keep using http://127.0.0.1:8000 yourself. Ctrl+C stops Prashna and the tunnel together.

You need the tunnel program once:

• Cloudflare: install cloudflared (macOS: brew install cloudflared; Windows: winget install --id Cloudflare.cloudflared; Linux: Cloudflare's downloads). No account is needed.
• ngrok: install it from ngrok.com/download and sign in once with ngrok config add-authtoken <your token>.

On the free plans they differ like this:

For a live room, prefer Cloudflare. Every live update makes each participant's page fetch new data, so one session with a large audience can use up ngrok's monthly request allowance.

The address is public while the tunnel runs. Stop Prashna when the session ends.

Roles

The admin who owns a session can do everything a moderator can, on the same page, plus the session's settings. The moderator link is how the admin hands the room to someone without an admin account.

Documentation

• Behaviour specification: every use case and its tests.
• UX rules: the frontend design system.
• Architecture: components, data model, design decisions, and risks.
• Development guide: setup, environment variables, tests, checks, and releases.
• Engineering backlog.
• Performance measurement.

To run Prashna in Docker instead, see the container guide. The production deployment behind nginx is described in the deployment runbook.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Status

Prashna runs in production at prashna.sankara.net for a single operator. It is released as a container image. Product ideas that need a decision are listed in the deferred appendix of the specification.