India e-Visa redesign concept

An open-source redesign of the India e-Visa portal (indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html), with a working prototype of the application flow. It is not an official site and is not affiliated with the Government of India. Applications made here are demo records: no visa is issued and no fee is taken.

Live: https://india-evisa.build.host · Apply flow: https://india-evisa.build.host/apply

The code is MIT licensed. Government teams, vendors and anyone else are free to use, adapt and deploy it.

How it works

• Content lives in an ERP.ai app called "India e-Visa Portal": eight tables (Services, Notices, Visa Types, Entry Ports, Checklist, FAQs, Helpdesks, Useful Links). Edit a row there and the site picks it up within five minutes.
• Server (server.mjs) is plain Node with no dependencies. It serves public/ and /api/content, which reads the ERP.ai tables server-side with its own key and caches the result. If ERP.ai is unreachable it serves the last good copy, or the bundled snapshot in seed/content.mjs.
• Frontend (public/) is static HTML, CSS and plain ES modules. It supports light and dark themes, three text sizes, and phone widths.
• Apply flow (/apply) is a four-step form: trip and contact, applicant, documents, review. It saves drafts and submissions to the ERP.ai "Applications" table through /api/applications/save|submit|lookup. "Continue a saved application" and "Check status" look a record up by its reference (EV-XXXX-XXXX) plus the applicant's email. Changing Status or Officer Note on the row in ERP.ai shows up on the status page, so the ERP.ai app doubles as a simple case-officer console. Documents are checked in the browser against the portal's size and format rules and are not uploaded.

Run locally

ERPAI_API_KEY=erp_pat_live_... ERPAI_APP_ID=50d6b33fcf63cc9bb87ecf86 npm start

Without the env vars the server runs on the bundled snapshot.

Variable	Default	Purpose
ERPAI_API_KEY	none	Key with records:read, records:write, tables:read, schema:read, ideally restricted to the one app
ERPAI_APP_ID	none	ERP.ai app holding the content
ERPAI_BASE_URL	https://apps.erp.ai	ERP.ai API origin
CACHE_SECONDS	300	How long /api/content caches ERP.ai reads
PORT	3000	Listen port

Seeding ERP.ai

seed/seed.mjs creates the app, tables and columns from seed/schema.mjs and loads seed/content.mjs. It needs a key with app, table, schema and record write scopes. It is safe to re-run: missing columns are added and content rows are upserted by Name. --reset deletes content rows first. The Applications table only gets its schema; the seed never touches submitted rows.

ERPAI_API_KEY=... node seed/seed.mjs                      # new app
ERPAI_API_KEY=... ERPAI_APP_ID=... node seed/seed.mjs --reset

Taking this to production

This repository is a starting point, not a drop-in replacement for the live service. An official deployment would also need, at least:

• Hosting on government or MeitY-empanelled infrastructure, with applicant data stored in India and handled under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
• Integration with the existing Bureau of Immigration back end for applications, document storage, status and ETA issue, and with the payment gateways (SBI ePay, Axis Bank, Razorpay).
• A security audit by a CERT-In empanelled auditor, and protections the prototype does not have (bot checks, persistent rate limits, audit logging).
• Compliance with the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW 3.0) and WCAG 2.1 AA, plus Hindi and other Indian languages.
• The full application form: the prototype collects a subset of the fields the official form asks for.

See CONTRIBUTING.md to help.

Source

Content was summarised from the official portal on 2026-10-26. Visa terms, fees and entry ports change; the official portal is the source of truth.