AURAK Schedule Finder

Pick your courses. Get every conflict-free timetable.

A schedule generator for students at the American University of Ras Al Khaimah, built for the one week a year that actually matters — registration. Instead of dragging courses around a calendar to see what fits, you pick what you want to take and get every valid combination at once.

🔗 aurak-scheduler.com

[!WARNING] Unofficial student tool — not affiliated with or endorsed by AURAK. Course data is pulled from AURAK's public schedule page and refreshed every 15 minutes, but it can lag reality. Always confirm on the official system before you register. Seat counts are deliberately not shown: stale seat data is worse than no seat data.

What it does

Pick a subject, pick a course, add another row, repeat. If you only want certain sections of a course — a specific instructor, or nothing at 8am — you can narrow a course down to just those. Hit generate and it works out every combination where nothing overlaps, then lets you page through them on a weekly grid.

Courses with no meeting times (senior projects, independent study) are handled properly rather than multiplying the results by every invisible section.

The course data refreshes itself every 15 minutes, so nobody has to remember to update anything.

How it's built

Layer	Stack	Hosted on
Frontend	React + Vite	Vercel
API	FastAPI + SQLAlchemy + Alembic	Render
Database	PostgreSQL	Supabase
Refresh (every 15 min)	Python scraper on GitHub Actions, started by cron-job.org	GitHub + cron-job.org

cron-job.org (every 15 min) → GitHub Actions
        │
        ▼
fetch_schedule.py ──── scrapes AURAK's public schedule page
        │
        ▼
   PostgreSQL  ◀────── FastAPI  ◀────── React frontend
   (Supabase)          (Render)         (Vercel, static)
                                              │
                                              ▼
                                   schedules generated in-browser

The combination search runs client-side, not on the server. It's a backtracking search over bitmask-encoded weekly occupancy — each section's meeting times are packed into a bitmask, so checking whether two classes collide is a single bitwise AND. Keeping it in the browser means a hundred students generating schedules at once costs the server nothing, which matters on a free tier during registration week.

Running it locally

Frontend

npm install
npm run dev

Backend

cd backend
python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Add a backend/.env with your database connection string:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://...

Then set up the schema, load real course data, and start the API:

alembic upgrade head
python fetch_schedule.py
uvicorn app:app --reload

Interactive API docs are available at http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs once it's running.

Note that the frontend's API URL is currently hardcoded to the deployed backend in src/App.jsx — point it at http://127.0.0.1:8000/courses if you want it hitting your local API instead.