The Daily Index

A personal morning newspaper. Every day it reads a few dozen news feeds, has an AI editor pick and summarise the stories that match your preferences, and prints them as one edition — alongside live markets, F1, weather and a few things worth your time.

Built with Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19 and Tailwind CSS 4, deployed on Vercel.

What's in the paper

Section	What it carries
Front page	The day's lead story, At a Glance (six must-read one-liners), the Editor's Desk note, On This Day, Word of the Day, and The Week Ahead: RBI and Fed decisions, market holidays, public holidays, IPO dates and the F1 weekend, in IST
Postcard	Travel mode: weather and local news for wherever you are (opt-in, one tap)
Dateline	World news, grouped by the countries you follow
The Nation	India's own news: government and policy, courts, economy, infrastructure, security and major incidents, led by what the whole country is reading
Two Cities	Local news from your cities, side by side (Bengaluru and Ranchi by default)
Paddock Notes	Formula 1 stories plus the pit wall: next race, countdown and circuit map, weekend session times, last race podium, your team and drivers, championship tables
Sports	Football and tennis, when you follow them
Clutch	Valorant: your teams (next match with the market's odds, last result, where they stand), the running VCT major and the scene's headlines; a tap opens the bracket and groups, a team's results since 2024, or a match's scoreboard (per map, live while it's on) with the two teams' head-to-head; small, and smaller still in the off-season
The Ledger	Markets and economy news — mostly India, some global
Market Pulse	16 live indices across India, US, Europe and Asia with a mood gauge per region (India: Tickertape's Market Mood Index, US: CNN Fear & Greed), gold and silver at IBJA's rate, other commodities in rupees, BTC/ETH in USDT, a tap-to-open chart for each (with its 52-week range and 50/200-day averages), a rates row (RBI repo, Fed funds, US 10-year, what FIIs and DIIs bought and sold, and the odds on the next decision), Nifty 50 breadth, when each market reopens, and IPO watch (mainboard IPOs with dates, size, GMP and the bidding's mood)
The Circuit Board	Technology
Straw Poll	Prediction-market odds from Polymarket and Kalshi, chosen for you: the day's biggest moves with the news that lines up with them, where the money is, your watchlist, a track record; plus three or four questions at the foot of each section and a line under a story when a market is about it. Every market opens with every contender's chart (1D to all time) and why it moved
Sky Report	Severe-weather alerts near you (NDMA), weather that follows the clock (moon and stars after sunset), rain chances through the day, air quality, and your other cities
The Grapevine	The Search Bar (what India, the US and the world are searching right now, from Google Trends), editor's picks from the day's wires, Reddit, a puzzle desk, and the film odds

Also: an archive of past editions as a calendar, a share sheet that turns any story into an image, light/dark editions, a particle-animated masthead, and a settings page to choose sections, their order, summary length and voice.

How it works

feeds (RSS / Google News)      ─┐
                                ├─► collectCorpus ─► AI selection ─► full text ─► AI writing ─► edition
reader preferences (browser)   ─┘                     (Gemini)                    (Gemini)       │
                                                                                                  ▼
                                               Upstash Redis: edition per preferences per day + archive

• Preferences stay in your browser. They are hashed; the hash identifies an edition, so there are no accounts. Readers with identical preferences share one edition.

• Editions are built on the server the first time they're asked for each day (and by a 05:30 IST cron for the default and recently-read editions), then stored and served instantly. An edition older than six hours is shown immediately while a fresh one builds.

• The AI never invents links. It picks articles by index from the corpus, and the server fills in real titles and URLs. Without an API key, a deterministic fallback still produces a paper.

• Live data is fetched client-side where it changes quickly: markets every minute (/api/markets), weather from Open-Meteo, F1 standings in stages (/api/f1).

• Every build reports on itself. Each feed's result, stage timings, the corpus by pool, full-text and link-decoding counts, and anything degraded: a summary on /api/health, the full report at /api/health?report=1.

ARCHITECTURE.md has the full design notes and a table of what is fetched where, when, and where it is stored.

Getting started

Requirements: Node.js 20+ and npm.

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then fill in what you need (see below)
npm run dev                  # http://localhost:3000

The paper runs with an empty .env.local: summaries fall back to RSS text, editions live in memory until the dev server restarts, and Reddit is off.

Environment variables

Variable	Needed for
GEMINI_API_KEY	AI selection and summaries (strongly recommended)
GEMINI_MODEL	Model override (default in .env.example)
GEMINI_F1_API_KEY	F1 team radio transcripts on their own Google project (falls back to GEMINI_API_KEY)
KV_REST_API_URL, KV_REST_API_TOKEN	Stored editions and the archive (Upstash Redis; UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_* also works)
CRON_SECRET	Protects /api/cron/*; Vercel Cron sends it automatically
REDDIT_ENABLED, REDDIT_CLIENT_ID, REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET, REDDIT_USER_AGENT	Reddit in the Grapevine (optional)
DATABASE_URL	Postgres for Login-with-Reddit only (optional)
EDITION_STALE_HOURS, EDITION_BUILDS_PER_DAY, EDITION_BUILDS_PER_IP, NEXT_PUBLIC_EDITION_TIME_ZONE	Optional tuning

.env.example explains each one.

Scripts

Command	Does
npm run dev	Development server
npm run build / npm start	Production build / serve it
npm run lint	ESLint
npm run typecheck	TypeScript, no emit

Deploying

1. Import the repo into Vercel.
2. Add the Upstash for Redis integration (Storage tab) — it injects the KV variables.
3. Set GEMINI_API_KEY and CRON_SECRET.
4. The daily cron is already declared in vercel.json.

Redis keys are prefixed with the Vercel environment, so preview deployments never touch the production archive.

Project layout

src/
  app/                 pages (front page, archive, settings) and API routes
    api/edition        build / fetch today's edition for a set of preferences
    api/markets        live indices, regional moods, commodities
    api/f1             F1 sidebar data, in stages
    api/travel         reverse-geocode + local headlines for travel mode
    api/cron           daily builds
  components/
    sections/          one component per paper section
    widgets/           pit wall, gauges, sparklines, weather blocks…
    masthead/ chrome/  masthead, top bar, motion runtime
    settings/ onboarding/
  lib/
    live/              feed list (feeds.ts), fetchers, digest pipeline (digest.ts)
    preferences/       preference schema, defaults, prompts, projection onto sections
    server/            edition store, snapshots, Gemini client

To change what the paper reads, edit src/lib/live/feeds.ts; each pool notes which feeds were dropped and why. Default sections and their prompts live in src/lib/preferences/default-preferences.json.

Data sources

RSS feeds from the publishers listed in feeds.ts (including RBI, TRAI and the personal-finance desks), Google News search feeds (city, travel, SEBI, PIB, tax and GST news) and Google News top and topic pages (a ranking signal: how many outlets carry a story and where it leads), Yahoo Finance (indices, commodities and charts), Binance (crypto), Tickertape and CNN (market mood), IBJA (gold and silver rates), NSE (IPO list, subscription, issue details, trading holidays, FII/DII flows and Nifty breadth), the Federal Reserve's FOMC calendar, FRED (Fed funds target), the RBI's home page (repo rate), Polymarket and Kalshi (prediction markets), Riot's esports API and VLR.gg (Valorant), NDMA's Sachet (weather alerts), GOV.UK and Google's holiday calendars (exchange holidays), Google's India holidays calendar, investorgain.com (IPO GMP, unofficial), OpenF1 (F1 schedule, results and standings), Open-Meteo (weather and air quality), OpenStreetMap Nominatim (travel-mode place names), Merriam-Webster (Word of the Day), Wikipedia (On This Day) and Reddit. Every story links to its original publisher.