CATAPULT
ADL's cmi5 player, content test suite and LMS test suite in one repository
The facts
- Licence
- Apache-2.0 — OSI approved
- Pricing
- Open source
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Platforms
- Web · Command line · Library
- Vendor
- Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative
- Headquarters
- United States
- Documentation
- adlnet.github.io/CATAPULT/ — opens in a new tab
- Source code
- github.com/adlnet/CATAPULT — opens in a new tab
Standards support
Every line says where the claim came from. We do not test conformance ourselves and we issue no badge of our own.
| Standard | Supported | Provenance | Checked | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCORM 1.2 | Not stated | — | — | — |
| SCORM 2004 | Not stated | — | — | — |
| xAPI | Yes | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026 | The player delegates xAPI handling to an external LRS rather than implementing one; it acts as a proxy enforcing the cmi5 requirements on statements passing through. | |
| cmi5 | Yes | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026— source, opens in a new tab | The repository ships a machine-readable index of the cmi5 specification's numbered requirements, a player that validates and launches courses against them, and two test suites. Read in source, August 2026. | |
| AICC | Not stated | — | — | — |
| LTI | Not stated | — | — | — |
- Claimed
- — the vendor states it. We have not confirmed it.
- Checked
- — an editor confirmed it on the date shown.
- Verified
- — an official registry lists it, and we link to the entry.
Editor's notes
CATAPULT is the reference point for cmi5. It was funded by the US Department of Defense and built by ADL with Rustici, and it is the closest thing the specification has to an executable definition of itself: requirements/requirements.json maps every numbered requirement in the cmi5 specification to its wording, and the applications in the repository are all built against that index.
Those applications answer different questions. The player is a launching system you can embed in an LMS — import, validate, launch, session tracking, statement proxying to an external LRS. The Content Test Suite tells a content developer whether their AU behaves; the LMS Test Suite tells a platform developer whether their launching system does. The course examples are worked packages demonstrating masteryScore, moveOn variants and multi-AU structures, which is often the fastest way to understand a clause you have read three times.
The caveats are practical rather than technical. This is prototype-quality software published as a reference — Docker Compose deployments, a Vue 2 test-suite UI, and an issue list that reflects a project whose funding ended. Recent commits are dependency upgrades rather than features, with v1.0.8 in January 2026.
If you are shipping cmi5 in either direction, you should be testing against this. If you want a supported cmi5 player to run in production, buy one.
Alternatives to CATAPULT
Chosen by hand because they solve the same problem, not because they share a keyword.
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