AllParx

An outdoor recreation directory for the United States. Google Places data is ingested into Firestore, and Next.js renders a static, SEO-optimised page for every location.

• Framework — Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4
• Data — Google Places API (New) → Firebase Firestore (Admin SDK)
• Hosting — Vercel, fronted by Cloudflare

URL structure

Route	Purpose
/	Homepage — featured categories and city index
/places/{slug}	One location. Slug is {name}-{city}, lowercased and hyphenated
/places	Every category
/places/category/{type}	All locations of one category
/cities	Every city
/cities/{city-slug}	All locations in one city, grouped by category
/sitemap.xml, /robots.txt, /llms.txt	Crawler entry points

The /places/{slug} format is load-bearing — existing allparx.com backlinks point at these URLs, so slugify() in scripts/ingest-places.ts must not change.

Setup

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then fill in the values

.env.local needs:

GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY=
NEXT_PUBLIC_FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID=
FIREBASE_CLIENT_EMAIL=
FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY=        # quoted, with literal \n escapes
NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL=https://allparx.com

The Firebase values come from the service-account JSON. That file and .env.local are both gitignored — never commit either.

Firestore

Before the first ingestion, the project needs a Firestore database. Create it once at console.firebase.google.com → Firestore Database → Create database → Native mode, location nam5. The Admin service account can read and write documents but cannot create the database or its indexes, so this step has to happen in the console or with an owner-level account.

Then deploy the rules and composite indexes:

npx firebase-tools deploy --only firestore

firestore.indexes.json defines the composite indexes the queries need. Two of them are required by the ordered queries:

Query	Index
getPlacesByType	placeType ASC, rating DESC
getPlacesByCity	city ASC, rating DESC

Until they exist, getPlacesByType and getPlacesByCity fall back to fetching the whole filtered set and sorting in memory. Pages still render correctly, but each query reads far more documents than it returns — the build logs a warning per call. Deploy the indexes to remove it.

Ingestion

npm run ingest:test              # first 5 cities — start here
npm run ingest -- --dry-run      # calls the Places API, writes nothing
npm run ingest -- --cities=10
npm run ingest -- --types=park,dog_park
npm run ingest                   # all 50 cities, all 18 categories

The script is idempotent: a slug that already exists is left untouched, so re-running only fills gaps. It reads existing documents in one batched getAll() per city+type and writes in a single batch, rather than one round trip per place.

Cost. Each city × category pair is one Nearby Search call. The field mask requests Enterprise-tier fields (editorialSummary, allowsDogs, restroom, parkingOptions, goodForChildren), which bills at the higher Places API rate. A full 50-city run is 900 calls. Check current pricing before a full run.

Place types. All 18 categories in src/lib/place-types.ts are verified against the live API. Three types from the original spec are rejected by Google as "Unsupported types" and were replaced:

Original	Replacement
nature_reserve	wildlife_refuge
recreation_center	community_center
fishing_area	fishing_pond

If you add a type, confirm it exists in Places API Table A first — an invalid type fails every call for that type.

Build-time snapshot

A static build renders one page per place plus category, city, sitemap and llms.txt routes. Answering each of those with its own Firestore query costs tens of thousands of document reads — enough to exhaust the free tier's 50,000/day in a single build, after which the build has no data and would otherwise ship an empty site.

So prebuild exports the collection once to .allparx-cache/places.json, and the data layer serves every query from that file:

npm run snapshot    # runs automatically before npm run build

	Reads per build
Per-page queries	~40,000
One snapshot	1,321 (one per place)

The snapshot is gitignored and regenerated on every build, including on Vercel. Without one — dev server, ISR revalidation — queries go straight to Firestore.

If the snapshot cannot be produced the build fails rather than deploying an empty site. The exception is NOT_FOUND, which means the project genuinely has no data yet, and builds an empty site as intended. SKIP_SNAPSHOT=1 forces the old per-query behaviour.

Read budget

At 1,321 places a build costs 1,321 reads — about 37 builds/day within the free tier. A full 50-city ingestion (~13,000 places) costs ~13,000 reads per build, which is only 3 builds/day. Move the project to the Blaze plan before ingesting all 50 cities.

Development

npm run dev      # http://localhost:3000
npm run build    # production build
npm run lint
npx tsc --noEmit

Firestore reads degrade gracefully when the database or collection is empty — next build warns and renders empty pages rather than failing. Any error other than NOT_FOUND still propagates.

SEO and AI discoverability

• Static rendering — every place, category and city page is prerendered (dynamic = 'force-static'), so crawlers get complete HTML with no JS
• JSON-LD on every page: WebSite + Organization site-wide, a per-category schema.org entity (Park, Campground, RVPark, Playground, …) with geo, openingHours, aggregateRating and amenityFeature on listings, plus BreadcrumbList and ItemList
• /sitemap.xml — generated from Firestore, covering listings, categories and cities. Google's ceiling is 50,000 URLs per file; past that, split into generateSitemaps() chunks with an index
• /robots.txt — names 19 AI crawlers explicitly (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, …) so they're allowed by an unambiguous rule
• /llms.txt — llmstxt.org summary of what the site holds and how its URLs are shaped, for assistants reading the site directly
• Canonical URLs, OpenGraph and Twitter cards on every route, plus a generated OG image and a web manifest
• Internal linking: breadcrumbs, "more in this city" blocks, and category/city indexes, so no listing is orphaned

Deployment

Pushes to main auto-deploy to Vercel. Set all five environment variables in Project → Settings → Environment Variables before the first build — the build reads Firestore, and FIREBASE_PRIVATE_KEY must keep its \n escapes.

Repository layout

scripts/ingest-places.ts     Places API → Firestore ingestion
src/lib/firebase-admin.ts    Admin SDK singleton
src/lib/firestore.ts         Typed data access
src/lib/place-types.ts       Categories, labels, schema.org mapping
src/lib/site.ts              Site constants and URL helpers
src/components/              PlaceCard, PlaceGrid, JsonLd
src/app/                     Routes, sitemap, robots, llms.txt, manifest
firestore.indexes.json       Composite indexes
firestore.rules              Client access closed; all access is server-side