Tonight NYC — Comedy Cellar Viewer

Web app, with iOS and Android wrappers, for browsing upcoming NYC comedy lineups across multiple venues.

tonightnyc.com · iOS · Android

Venues covered: Comedy Cellar, The Stand, NY Comedy Club, Gotham Comedy Club, Stand Up NY, Union Hall, and big-ticket shows via SeatGeek/Ticketmaster.

Features: Per-show comedian breakdowns, fave/skip ratings, sold-out detection, email alerts, and a sharable preferences link.

Project structure

src/          JS source files (concatenated + minified → public/app.min.js)
api/          Vercel serverless functions (lineup proxy, venue scrapers, alerts)
  cron/       Cron handlers (daily alert check; venue scrape, unscheduled)
scripts/      Build and prebake scripts (data baking, photo download, bio filling)
public/       Static output served to the browser
  data/       Prebaked JSON caches (refreshed by the Nightly Prebake workflow)
  photos/     Comedian headshots
ios/          Capacitor iOS wrapper
android/      Capacitor Android wrapper
.github/      Nightly Prebake + Lighthouse workflows

Local development

npm install

# Full dev server with live Vercel Functions (requires Vercel CLI + env vars):
npm run dev:vercel

# Static-only preview (API calls require env vars to work):
npm run build && npx serve public -p 3000

Building

npm run build

Concatenates src/jazz.js → native.js → prefs.js → data.js → render.js → ui.js → init.js → account.js into public/app.js, minifies via Terser + CleanCSS, then updates the cache-bust hash in public/index.html.

Environment variables

Variable	File	Purpose
SEATGEEK_CLIENT_ID	api/big-shows.js	Comedy events from SeatGeek
TM_API_KEY	api/photo-lookup.js	Ticketmaster photo search
KV_REST_API_URL	api/alerts.js, api/cron/check-alerts.js	Upstash Redis for email alerts
KV_REST_API_TOKEN	same	Upstash Redis auth token
CRON_SECRET	api/cron/check-alerts.js, api/cron/scrape-venues.js	Secures the cron endpoints
RESEND_API_KEY	api/cron/check-alerts.js	Resend for outbound alert emails

Deployment

Deployed to Vercel. public/ is the static output directory; api/ contains serverless functions deployed automatically.

• Nightly Prebake (GitHub Actions, .github/workflows/prebake.yml) — runs at 3 am and 6 pm ET. scripts/prebake.js pulls every venue's lineups, downloads new headshots, fills missing bios, and commits the refreshed public/data/ + public/photos/. That push redeploys the site, so pages load from static JSON with no function calls at runtime.
• Daily at 14:00 UTC (Vercel cron, vercel.json) — api/cron/check-alerts.js checks upcoming lineups and emails subscribers whose watched comedians are newly listed.
• api/cron/scrape-venues.js (Comedy Cellar residency/venue changes) is kept but not on a schedule.

iOS and Android apps

Both wrappers use Capacitor (capacitor.config.json, app id com.jacobhl.tonightnyc). Source lives in ios/ and android/. Neither is part of the Vercel deploy (see .vercelignore). The web app detects window.Capacitor and adjusts theme handling and haptics accordingly.