Find a Bible Study

A campus Bible study directory where students find a study and join it in about ten seconds, with no account. Leaders get a dashboard to post their study and follow up with the people who want to come.

Live: findabiblestudy.org · Built by Jacob Qubain

Why

Finding a Bible study on campus usually means a club fair table, a stale group chat, or a sign-up form nobody follows up on. Every extra step (an account, a password, a long form) is a reason not to go. This app removes those steps for students, and gives leaders a simple way to reach everyone who shows interest.

Features

Students

• Pick your campus once; the site remembers it. Each campus has its own shareable page, like findabiblestudy.org/tulsa-university.
• Filter by day, time of day, who it's for, focus, format, and area. Filters live in the URL, so a filtered list can be shared.
• Each study shows when it meets next ("Tomorrow at 6:30pm"), what to expect, and who leads it.
• Join with just a name and an email or phone number. The exact address or video link is revealed on joining, not published.
• Add it to Google Calendar, or Apple/Outlook (a recurring .ics invite), or text the leader directly.
• Nothing fits? Say when you're free (pre-filled from the filters you tried), and the campus's missionaries reach out. Campuses without a contact send these to the admins.

Leaders

• Sign in with an emailed link; there are no passwords.
• Post, edit, pause, and delete studies. "Write it for me" drafts the "What to expect" paragraph from the study's details.
• Get an email for every new person, and reply straight to them.
• See everyone who reached out, track their status, text, call, or email them in one tap, and remove people from the list.
• Export people to phone contacts (.vcf) or a spreadsheet (.csv), or copy all numbers to start a group chat.

Campus missionaries

• See everyone who couldn't find a study, and a days × times grid of when they're free, next to when studies already meet. Tap a time to see who's free then, to invite them somewhere or start a new study.

Admins

• Approve new leaders before their studies go public, which keeps spam out.
• List a study on someone's behalf: it goes live under their name, they're emailed, and signing in with that email makes it theirs.
• Add campuses, choose each campus's contacts, and print a QR-code flyer for each campus.

Screenshots use the built-in sample data.

Tech stack

App	Next.js 16 (App Router, Server Components, Server Actions), React 19, TypeScript
Styling	Tailwind CSS v4, Lucide icons; mobile-first with light and dark themes
Database & auth	Supabase: PostgreSQL with row-level security, passwordless email sign-in
Email	Resend, from a verified custom domain
Validation	Zod
Hosting	Vercel, deploying automatically from main; Vercel Web Analytics

Engineering highlights

• Access control lives in the database. Postgres row-level security and column-level privileges decide what visitors, leaders, and admins can read and write. Leaders can only touch their own studies and can't approve themselves. Addresses and meeting links sit in a separate table that only the study's leaders can read. Visitors join through a single database function that validates the request, rate-limits it, and returns the private details. See the migrations.
• The security rules are tested. npm run test:db applies every migration to an in-memory Postgres (PGlite) and runs 74 checks of what each role can and can't do (supabase/tests/rls.test.mjs).
• Schedules handle time zones correctly. Studies are stored as local wall-clock times per campus. The next meeting is computed across daylight-saving changes, handles every-other-week studies, and never lands before the first meeting (lib/schedule.ts). Calendar invites use recurring events (lib/calendar.ts).
• Unmet demand becomes a plan. When no study fits, students leave their availability instead of leaving. The missionaries' grid counts who's still looking in each day × time slot (a "flexible" student counts everywhere) and marks slots where a study already meets, so gaps worth a new study stand out (lib/leader/requests.ts).
• Joining never waits on anything else. The leader's notification email is sent after the response goes back, using Next's after(), so a slow email service can't slow the visitor down (lib/notify.ts).
• User input is treated as untrusted. Visitor text is HTML-escaped in emails. Spreadsheet exports neutralize anything that could run as a formula. A hidden honeypot field catches form bots. Sign-in redirects only allow same-site paths.

Public API

Other sites can show live studies. Responses are JSON, readable from any origin (CORS), and cached for 5 minutes. Only public details are included: never addresses, meeting links, emails, or phone numbers. Each study's url links back to its page, where people join.

Endpoint	Returns
GET /api/v1/campuses	Campuses with at least one live study
GET /api/v1/studies	Every live study, soonest next meeting first
GET /api/v1/studies?campus=<slug>	Live studies for one campus (404 if the campus doesn't exist)

const res = await fetch("https://findabiblestudy.org/api/v1/studies?campus=tulsa-university");
const { studies } = await res.json();
// studies[0] → { title, summary, url, schedule: { label: "Thursdays · 5pm", nextMeeting, … },
//               location: { name, area }, format, leaders: [{ name, photoUrl }], audience, focus, … }

Running locally

git clone https://github.com/Jacob-Qubain/bible-study-directory.git
cd bible-study-directory
npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:3000, using sample data
npm run test:db      # database security tests

To connect a real database, copy .env.example to .env.local with your Supabase project's URL and keys. Then apply supabase/migrations/ in order (with supabase db push or the SQL editor), and optionally supabase/seed.sql. .env.example also documents the optional Resend settings for email.

Project structure

app/
  page.tsx                 Campus picker
  [campus]/                A campus's directory
  studies/[slug]/          Study page, join form, calendar invite
  leader/                  Sign-in, dashboard, study editor, people, admin
components/                Directory, filters, cards, form controls
lib/                       Data access, schedules, filters, email, auth helpers
supabase/                  Migrations, seed data, security tests
proxy.ts                   Session refresh and sign-in guard for /leader

The roadmap and design notes are in docs/PLAN.md.