Flavor Day

Projects | 2026 | Links: Link

• Frontend single-page application built with React 19, Vite, and TypeScript.
• Map rendered with MapLibre GL JS over self-hosted Protomaps vector tiles on Cloudflare R2.
• No custom backend server: the SPA reads straight from Supabase Postgres via PostgREST, secured with row-level security.
• Daily ingestion via a Supabase Edge Function on a pg_cron schedule, sweeping Culver’s locator API with an adaptive grid.
• Self-hosted Caddy locator proxy behind a Cloudflare Tunnel, so data pulls egress from a residential IP.
• DevOps CI/CD pipeline in GitLab with Infisical-injected secrets, deploying to Cloudflare Pages and Supabase.

Flavor Day finds the Culver’s Flavor of the Day near you, without extra clicks. Every location is dropped on the map as a marker showing that day’s custard, so you can see at a glance where to go.

Why the rewrite

The original Flavor Day (2022) was a Ruby on Rails API and a Vue.js SPA, shipped as Docker containers to a DigitalOcean droplet. Then Culver’s retired the locator endpoint the Rails app depended on, and the daily data pulls broke.

Rather than patch it, I rebuilt it as a TypeScript monorepo with almost no ops to run:

• The rake tasks became a Supabase Edge Function on a pg_cron schedule. It waits on a canary store until Culver’s rolls the day’s flavor, then subdivides its search grid wherever the API hits its 100-result cap, and upserts flavors, locations, and today’s pairings.
• The Rails API went away. The React app queries a today_flavors view directly with supabase-js.
• Culver’s serves degraded responses to datacenter IPs and drops the flavor from dense metros like Milwaukee and Madison. Ingestion therefore routes through a small Caddy proxy on my home lab, fronted by a Cloudflare Tunnel.