Pri

Find the official maximum retail price of a product in Mauritius and Rodrigues.

The prices come from the four public lists of the Price Fixing Unit (Ministry of Commerce and Consumer Protection) at https://pfu.govmu.org:

Key	List	Page
p	Max retail prices	/max-retail-prices-p
s	Subsidised max retail prices	/max-retail-prices-s
ph	Max retail prices, pharmaceutical	/max-retail-prices-pharmaceutical
phs	Subsidised max retail prices, pharmaceutical	/subsidised-mrp-pharmaceutical

This is an independent project by Aplica. It is not a government website.

How it works

The site is static and builds in seconds. The data is pulled separately:

1. api/pull (a Vercel function, also runnable as npm run pull) reads the official lists for up to four minutes per run, picking up where the last run stopped, and keeps what it has in Vercel Blob storage (scripts/lib/collector.mjs).
   • The newest rows sit at the top of each list and are read first.
   • The full medicines list (about 57,000 batches, a minute per unfiltered page) is pulled through name searches, which answer in about a second, then completed once by a slow page-by-page read.
   • Each list gets a complete read-through every few days; rows missed by the official site's unstable paging are kept from earlier read-throughs, and rows that really left the list are dropped after two read-throughs.
2. scripts/lib/outputs.mjs turns those stores into the three files the page loads.
3. api/data serves them from Blob (/data/*.json); until the first pull, the copy built from site/seed/ at deploy time is served instead.
4. api/medicines searches the official medicines list live for a name.

Triggers: Vercel Cron calls /api/pull once a day; any other scheduler can call it too (rate-limited to once every 20 minutes unless it sends CRON_SECRET).

Vercel setup

• Storage: create a Blob store and connect it to the project (BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN is added to the project automatically).
• Optional: CRON_SECRET environment variable, so scheduled calls skip the rate limit.

Sign-in and shopping lists (optional)

Sign-in uses Supabase (free plan is enough to start). Without it, the page works as before and simply shows no sign-in button.

1. Create a project at supabase.com. In SQL Editor, run supabase/schema.sql.
2. Authentication, URL Configuration: set Site URL to https://pri.aplica.biz and add it to Redirect URLs (also https://pri-ashy.vercel.app and http://localhost:4173 for testing).
3. Authentication, Providers: turn on the ones wanted. Google needs an OAuth client from Google Cloud Console; Facebook an app from developers.facebook.com; Apple an Apple Developer account. Email links work out of the box.
4. In Vercel, Settings, Environment Variables, add:
   • SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_ANON_KEY (Supabase, Project Settings, API)
   • SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY (same page; lets people delete their account; never shown to the page)
   • PRI_AUTH_PROVIDERS, e.g. google,facebook,apple,email
5. Redeploy.

Only the email address (kept by Supabase Auth) and each person's lists are stored; each person can read only their own rows (row level security), and can delete their account from the page.

Where the data is kept

The pull keeps its copy of the lists in a public Supabase Storage bucket (pri-data, created automatically) when SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY (or the newer secret key) are set, which the Supabase integration does on Vercel. Without them it falls back to Vercel Blob (BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN), then to a local folder. PRI_STORAGE=blob or PRI_STORAGE=file forces one. For a long run on your own computer, put the same two Supabase values in .env.local.

The first full copy

The daily four-minute runs would take weeks to walk the whole medicines list, so the first copy is best made from any computer that can run Node for a few hours:

1. In Vercel open the project, then Storage, then the Blob store, then its ".env.local" tab, and press "Copy Snippet".
2. Paste the snippet into a file named .env.local in the project folder (it is ignored by git). It looks like BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN="vercel_blob_rw_...".
3. npm install, then npm run check (shows whether the storage answers and what is in it), then PRI_MINUTES=720 npm run pull (PowerShell: $env:PRI_MINUTES="720"; npm run pull).

The run can be stopped and restarted at any time; progress is saved every couple of minutes, and the hosted site's daily run carries on from the same storage.

Commands

npm test          # against a local stand-in for the official site
npm run check     # test the Blob token and show what is in storage
npm run pull      # pull for four minutes (PRI_MINUTES=720 for a long run);
                  # into Blob with BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN, otherwise into data/store/
npm run build     # rebuild site/seed-data from site/seed
npm run dev       # preview on http://localhost:4173

Node 20 or later.