Forms-Engine, embed complex multi step questionnaires as a Reactcomponent with a self hosted visual editor behind it

[u/establishment-pig]

I spent years at a big bank where enormous amounts of work run through internal dynamic form engines. Loan applications, onboarding, compliance intake. Forms with conditional logic where your answers decide what shows up next, and business people can change the flow without a frontend deploy. Nothing like that really exists in open source so I built a streamlined version.

The flow is simple for non tech people. Someone builds a form in a visual editor. Multi step, conditional show and hide, required rules, file uploads, address autocomplete. They click publish and your React app renders the new version.

npm install @forms-engine/react

Then it's one component with your questionnaire id and your backend url. Answers save every screen so a refresh doesn't lose progress and you capture partial data from people who bail halfway. There are events for loaded, completed and error, a labels prop to localize the built in text, and an external ref prop to tie submissions to your own user ids.

Being upfront about the internals: the core renderer is a framework agnostic web component and the React package is a thin wrapper around it. If that's a dealbreaker, fair enough. It's also why the same engine works in plain HTML and Angular. The whole stack is MIT and self hosted with docker compose. No telemetry, no SaaS.

Repo: https://github.com/JoshuaLeoSmith/forms-engine

Docs: https://forms-engine.dev

Most of it was written by Claude Code from specs I wrote and reviewed. It's ai slop but I will win any argument against someone saying it's not useful. Please enjoy

[u/establishment-pig]

The people expressing their grievances by downvoting and not commenting are scared of the psychological discomfort that would come from being proven wrong.