UNIREAL — University reviews & answers (mobile-first, multilingual)

A Next.js 15 web app for discovering universities worldwide, reading real reviews and asking questions. Mobile-first, SEO-friendly (SSR + JSON-LD), trilingual (English / Română / فارسی with RTL).

Stack

• Next.js 15 (App Router) + React 19 + TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS (mobile-first)
• next-intl — i18n routing for en / ro / fa (+ RTL)
• Supabase — wired behind a swappable data layer (currently off; mock mode)

Getting started

npm install
cp .env.example .env        # defaults to NEXT_PUBLIC_DATA_SOURCE=mock
npm run dev                 # http://localhost:3000  → redirects to /en

Visit /en, /ro, /fa. The /fa routes render right-to-left.

Data pipeline (university database)

A layered enrichment pipeline merges several free, legally-licensed sources. Output is written to data/universities.json (the mock seed; later loaded into Supabase). Raw API responses are cached under data/raw/.

Step	Command	Source	Adds
1	npm run data:hipolabs	Hipolabs (MIT)	name, country, domains, website, slug
2	npm run data:enrich	OpenAlex (CC0)	ROR/Wikidata ids, geo, logo, multilingual names, research score
3	npm run data:scorecard	College Scorecard	US tuition, admission rate, size (needs SCORECARD_API_KEY)
4	npm run data:wikidata	Wikidata (CC0)	logo, founding year, students, fa/ro labels
—	npm run data:merge	—	dedupe, sort, validate, print stats

Quick build (steps 1, 2, merge):

npm run data:build
# bound OpenAlex paging while testing:
npm run data:enrich -- --max-pages=20

Why multiple sources?

No single source has everything. Hipolabs gives breadth + the email domains that power the Verified badge. OpenAlex (built on ROR) adds canonical ids, geo, logos and — crucially for this trilingual app — localized university names (fa/ro), all under CC0. Scorecard enriches US tuition/outcomes. Official QS/THE rankings are proprietary, so we derive a CC0 researchScore from OpenAlex works/citations instead.

Architecture: swappable data layer

The UI only talks to repo (lib/data/index.ts), an implementation of DataRepository. Today it resolves to the in-memory mock repository; set NEXT_PUBLIC_DATA_SOURCE=supabase to switch to Supabase — no UI changes.

• lib/data/types.ts — canonical models
• lib/data/repository.ts — the interface
• lib/data/mock/ — current implementation (reads data/universities.json)
• lib/data/supabase/ — skeleton + // TODO(supabase) markers
• supabase/migrations/0001_init.sql — schema + RLS + verified-badge function

Verified badge

A reviewer/answerer is Verified when their email domain matches a university's registered domain (lib/data/verify.ts; SQL mirror in the migration). In mock mode auth is simulated (lib/auth/AuthContext.tsx) and writes are in-memory (reset on reload).

Enabling Supabase later

1. npm install @supabase/supabase-js
2. Create a Supabase project; run supabase/migrations/0001_init.sql.
3. Seed universities from data/universities.json.
4. Implement lib/data/supabase/index.ts and lib/supabase.ts.
5. Set NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL, NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY, NEXT_PUBLIC_DATA_SOURCE=supabase.

Deploy

Deploy to Vercel; set the env vars from .env.example.