Darsak
An Arabic-first marketplace for private tutors, built for Arab citizens of Israel. Arabic is the
default language, Hebrew and English sit beside it, and right-to-left is the default layout rather
than a mode.
Status: deployed on Vercel at https://darsak-umber.vercel.app. The directory and landing
pages are browsable, and the tutors on them are seeded demo data, not real supply. Phone sign-in
waits on an SMS provider; an email and password option sits beside it. Search indexing is closed on
purpose until the custom domain is attached (see below).
The same landing page in Arabic and in English. Tutor names, ratings and lesson counts are demo data.
What's interesting in here
Three locales, RTL by default, native-script URLs. Every route lives under
app/[locale]/, so there is no un-localised branch of the app. Paths are
translated per locale through next-intl (i18n/routing.ts), so the Arabic and
Hebrew URLs are in their own script, which is an SEO decision as much as a localisation one. An
ESLint rule flags physical direction utilities like pl-4 (eslint.config.mjs),
because in an app that renders right to left first, those are defects rather than style.
A build that stopped growing with the taxonomy. The first Vercel build took 68 minutes. Every
subject and locality page asked the same "which pairs have tutors?" question three times, a
group by across a five-table join, about four thousand times per build. Those reads are now
memoised per process (lib/data/supply-cache.ts). Then the cross-product
itself: 114 subjects by 78 localities is a ceiling of 8,892 pages per locale, at 0.76 seconds a page
on the builder. So only the 150 deepest-supply pairs per locale are prerendered and the long tail
renders on first request (lib/seo/prerender.ts), while the sitemap still
lists every page. Deploys take about 14 minutes now.
Indexing that opens itself only when the supply is real. app/robots.ts keeps
crawlers out until three things hold at once: a real database, a production deployment, and a host
that is not *.vercel.app. A directory of demo tutors would teach a search engine the wrong thing
about the site, and a preview URL settling in as canonical is expensive to unwind. Attaching the
custom domain is the switch, and nothing has to be remembered on launch day.
Suites for the bugs that do not throw. Each check script pins a failure that renders a page
instead of crashing:
| Script | What it pins |
|---|
| check-search.ts | Arabic and Hebrew normalisation, so every native-script slug resolves back to exactly one subject or locality. Two real bugs shipped through here: one 404'd a town page, one served the wrong subject under a 200. |
| check-messages.ts | Locale parity across Arabic, Hebrew and English, comparing ICU placeholders and not just key presence |
| check-scheduling.ts | Israel wall-clock time to absolute instants on both sides of both daylight-saving transitions, where a naive offset silently moves half the year's lessons by an hour |
| check-notifications.ts | Every notification kind rendered in every locale, links built for the recipient's locale, and coalescing |
One smaller decision worth a look: no phone number, tutor's or student's, is ever shown to the
other party. That is enforced at the data layer, not in the components: the
Counterpart type has no phone field, so a later change to a view cannot
leak one into the HTML.
Stack
Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui on Base UI, next-intl,
Drizzle ORM, Supabase (Postgres, Auth, row-level security), Zod, Web Push, Vercel. The functions and
the database both run in Frankfurt, because database round trips dominate the request and a
Supabase project's region is fixed when it is created (vercel.ts).
How it was built
I built Darsak solo over three days in August 2026, with Claude Code as a pair programmer, which is
why the commits carry a Claude co-author line. The architecture, the verification suites and the
product decisions are mine.
Run locally
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:3000, redirects to /ar
The directory runs on fixture data with no configuration at all, with a banner marking the demo
tutors as demo. Sign-in, onboarding and the dashboard need a database. A complete local stack, no
cloud account required:
npx supabase start # needs Docker running
cp .env.example .env.local # fill in from `npx supabase status`
npm run db:migrate # Drizzle schema
npm run db:sql # search functions, RLS, constraints
npm run db:seed # taxonomy: 114 subjects, 78 localities
npm run db:seed:tutors # optional: 28 demo tutors
npm run db:seed:availability # optional: weekly calendars, so booking works
Sign in with 050-0000001, 050-0000002 or 050-0000003 and code 123456. These are fixed test
codes in supabase/config.toml, so no SMS provider is needed locally.
npm run check:search # taxonomy slug round trip
npm run check:i18n # locale parity across ar, he and en
npm run check:slots # Israel-time slot maths across both DST transitions
npm run check:notify # notification copy, links and coalescing
npm run typecheck && npm run lint && npm run build
Layout
app/[locale]/ all routes; [locale]/layout.tsx is the root layout
i18n/ next-intl routing with localised pathnames
messages/ ar.json, he.json, en.json
components/ marketplace, messaging, scheduling, onboarding, site, ui (shadcn, RTL)
lib/
taxonomy/ subjects and localities, the source of truth that seeds the database
search/ Arabic and Hebrew normalisation and resolution
data/ tutor repository: fixtures and Postgres behind one contract
messaging/ inquiries, conversations, messages
scheduling/ availability, slot generation, Israel-time conversion
seo/ JSON-LD, hreflang alternates, landing-page stats, prerender budget
auth/ session, phone normalisation, sign-in
db/ Drizzle schema and client
supabase/sql/ search functions, RLS policies, messaging and notification triggers
scripts/ seeds and the check suites
docs/ architecture notes
The architecture notes are in docs/04-tech-architecture.md, and the
coding conventions are in AGENTS.md. The product plan is kept private.
License
All rights reserved. See LICENSE.
