KL Sync

An unofficial ERP client for KL University.

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What it is

KL University's ERP handles attendance, marks, fees, and the rest of student records, but logging in means solving a captcha by hand every time, and the interface wasn't built for a phone.

KL Sync sits in front of it. Log in once with your normal ERP credentials, and it solves the captcha for you, holds onto your session, and turns the same data into a fast, installable, dark-themed dashboard.

It's an independent project built by a student, not something run or endorsed by KL University — see Disclaimer.

Features

Dashboard

Attendance (per-subject breakdown), internal marks, end-semester results, CGPA, timetable, fee orders, exam seating allotment, circulars, hostel info, library circulation history, and profile with your ID photo.

Tools

• An attendance calculator: how many classes you can miss and still hold 75%, or how many you need to attend to reach 75% or 85%.
• A CGPA goal predictor: the GPA you'd need this semester to hit a target CGPA.
• A standalone scan-to-text tool that runs OCR on any uploaded image, entirely in the browser.

Login and session

• The login captcha is solved automatically — nothing to type by hand.
• Your session is held in a single cookie so you're not logging in on every visit.
• Installable as a PWA: add it to your home screen and it opens full-screen, like a native app.

How it works

flowchart TD
    A["Login form"] -->|"username + password"| B["POST /api/login"]
    B --> C["Fetch ERP captcha image"]
    C -->|"sharp preprocessing + OCR.space"| D["Captcha solved"]
    D -->|"submit to ERP"| E["newerp.kluniversity.in"]
    E -->|"session cookies + CSRF token"| F["Encrypted kl_erp_session cookie"]
    F --> G["/api/erp-proxy/[module]"]
    G -->|"replays request"| E
    E -->|"raw ERP HTML"| H["Cheerio parser"]
    H -->|"clean JSON"| I["Dashboard"]

Loading

1. You submit your ERP username and password on the login page.
2. The app fetches the live captcha image from the ERP and solves it via the OCR.space API. KLU's captcha is solid-colour glyphs on a transparent background, so the image is preprocessed with sharp to isolate the alpha channel before OCR — that step is most of what makes the auto-solve reliable.
3. On a successful login, the ERP's session cookies and CSRF token are packed into one kl_erp_session cookie. If SESSION_SECRET is set, that cookie is encrypted with AES-256-GCM; otherwise it falls back to base64, which is fine for local development but not for a public deployment.
4. middleware.ts checks for that cookie on every /dashboard/* request and redirects to the login page if it's missing.
5. Every dashboard page reads from one route, /api/erp-proxy/[module]. It decrypts the session, replays the request against the real ERP, and parses the HTML that comes back with Cheerio into JSON.

Getting started

Requires Node.js 20+.

git clone https://github.com/tejaswin-amara/kl-sync.git
cd kl-sync
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Environment variables

Neither is required to run the app locally, but both matter for anything beyond your own machine. Create a .env.local in the project root:

SESSION_SECRET=some-long-random-string
OCR_SPACE_API_KEY=your-ocr-space-key

Variable	Purpose
SESSION_SECRET	Encrypts the session cookie with AES-256-GCM instead of plain base64. Set this for any deployment beyond your own machine.
OCR_SPACE_API_KEY	A free key from ocr.space/ocrapi. Without it, the app falls back to shared public demo keys, which run out of quota often and make captcha auto-fill fail silently.

Tech stack

Framework	Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack)
UI	React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, Framer Motion
Language	TypeScript
ERP scraping	Cheerio
OCR	OCR.space API for the login captcha, Tesseract.js for the in-app scan tool
PWA	next-pwa
Icons	Lucide

Project structure

src/
├── app/
│   ├── api/
│   │   ├── login/                # ERP login
│   │   ├── captcha/               # fetch the captcha image
│   │   ├── solve-captcha/         # OCR the captcha
│   │   ├── erp-proxy/[module]/    # attendance, marks, fee, timetable, and the rest
│   │   └── fetch-photo/           # student ID photo
│   ├── dashboard/                 # attendance, marks, fee, timetable, hostels, library...
│   └── page.tsx                   # login screen
├── components/                    # navigation, glass-card, OCR tool, calculators
├── lib/
│   ├── scraper.ts                 # ERP HTML parsing (Cheerio)
│   ├── ocr.ts                     # captcha preprocessing + OCR.space
│   └── session.ts                 # session encode/decode
└── middleware.ts                  # guards /dashboard routes

Disclaimer

KL Sync is an independent project built by a student, for KLU students. It has no affiliation with, endorsement from, or support from KL University.

Your ERP username and password are used once, to authenticate against the real ERP, and are never written to disk. After that, the app keeps only the resulting session — encrypted if SESSION_SECRET is set. If you're using an instance someone else deployed rather than running your own, your session still passes through their server, so self-hosting is the safer option if that matters to you.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

This project is under copyright. See LICENSE for details.

Security

To report a vulnerability securely, see SECURITY.md.

Code of Conduct

We're committed to a welcoming community. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

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Built by Tejaswin for KLU students stuck retyping captchas.