Indicial.ro
Indicial.ro is a Romanian currency exchange rate site — daily reference rates,
a currency converter, and historical rate charts, built on the official
public XML feeds published by the National Bank of Romania (BNR).
It offers the same kind of functionality as sites like valutare.ro (daily
rates, converter, exchange-office comparison, historical charts), with
original branding and design. The official reference rate is fetched live
from BNR; exchange-office and bank rates are real quotes entered manually
from their own published boards/sites (no live feed exists for those), kept
current by periodic updates.
Stack
- Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS v4
- Recharts for the historical rate chart
- fast-xml-parser to parse BNR's XML feeds
Data sources
- Daily rates:
https://www.bnr.ro/nbrfxrates.xml
- Historical rates:
https://www.bnr.ro/files/xml/years/nbrfxrates{year}.xml
Both are public feeds documented at bnr.ro. If they're unreachable (e.g. no
outbound network access), the app falls back to bundled sample data and
labels it as such in the UI.
Automatic daily refresh
BNR republishes rates once a day, usually between 13:00 and 13:15 Europe/Bucharest
time. Two mechanisms keep the site in sync with no manual steps:
- Time-based fallback (works on any host). Fetches to the BNR feeds are
cached for 5 minutes (rates) / 1 hour (history) via Next.js's fetch cache
(
src/lib/bnr.ts). The first request after that window expires
automatically refetches BNR in the background. No cron needed — worst case
the site is a few minutes stale.
- Instant refresh via
/api/revalidate (optional, for precise timing).
This route calls revalidateTag/revalidatePath to invalidate the cache
immediately. vercel.json schedules it twice a day, at 10:15 and 11:15 UTC
— one of those always lands at ~13:15 Bucharest time regardless of
DST (EEST in summer, EET in winter), so it self-adjusts across the
March/October clock changes without editing the schedule.
To enable step 2 on Vercel: set a CRON_SECRET environment variable in the
project settings (any random string). Vercel automatically sends it as
Authorization: Bearer <CRON_SECRET> when it triggers the cron, and the route
checks it before revalidating. On another host, hit the same URL from your
own scheduler instead, e.g.:
curl "https://your-domain.com/api/revalidate?secret=$CRON_SECRET"
Without CRON_SECRET set, /api/revalidate responds 500 and the site
still updates fine via mechanism 1, just within a 5-minute window instead of
instantly.
Getting started
npm install
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000.
Project structure
src/lib/bnr.ts — fetch/parse BNR feeds, with fallback datasrc/lib/demoOffices.ts — sample exchange-office comparison datasrc/app/api/rates, src/app/api/history — JSON endpoints used by client componentssrc/app/* — home, /convertor, /istoric, /despre
