INGInious is a free, open-source automated grading platform for programming courses. See its Docker-based features, LMS integrations, and alternatives.
INGInious is a free, open-source platform for automated assessment of programming assignments, built by the INGI computer science department at the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium since 2014, with partial funding from the Walloon region. It positions itself as an online teaching assistant, letting students submit code and receive detailed, non-binary feedback rather than a simple pass or fail.
The platform is written in Python and released under the AGPL license, with source code maintained on GitHub. It uses Docker to execute untrusted student code in isolated, secure containers and MongoDB to track submissions and grading history, giving institutions a self-hostable grading engine they can run entirely on their own infrastructure.
At its core, INGInious lets instructors write custom automated test suites that grade student code submissions and return granular feedback explaining what worked, what did not, and why, rather than a binary correct/incorrect result. This is especially valuable for large introductory programming courses and massive open online courses (MOOCs), where manual grading of every submission is impractical.
Because grading runs inside Docker containers, INGInious can safely execute arbitrary, potentially broken or malicious student code without risking the host system. The platform also ships an LTI integration module, allowing it to plug into existing learning management systems like Open edX and Moodle as an external grader, and it supports 10 interface languages, reflecting adoption across a broad international base of universities.
INGInious is entirely free and open source under the AGPL license. There are no paid tiers, subscriptions, or commercial licensing fees; institutions download the platform from GitHub and self-host it on their own servers.
The only real cost to a school or university is the infrastructure needed to run the Docker-based grading environment and MongoDB database, plus the system-administration effort to configure test suites for each course's programming language and toolchain.
Yes, INGInious is fully free and open source under the AGPL license with no commercial pricing tiers.
INGInious was developed by the INGI computer science department at the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Belgium, with development ongoing since 2014.
It runs untrusted student submissions inside isolated Docker containers, preventing them from affecting the host system.
Yes, INGInious provides an LTI module that lets it function as an external automated grader within Open edX or Moodle courses.
It is best suited for automated grading of programming assignments in university courses and massive open online courses (MOOCs).
The platform's interface supports 10 languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Vietnamese, and Norwegian.