update-apex-calendar

name	update-apex-calendar
description	Re-scrape Apex Pickleball Clubs sessions from PodPlay, refresh events.json, and redeploy the static GitHub Pages site. Use when asked to "update apex calendar", "refresh podplay data", "redeploy apex", or when running a scheduled /loop to keep the live site current.

Update Apex Calendar

Refreshes the session data behind the Apex PodPlay Helper site and redeploys it. The site is static (GitHub Pages from main root, no GitHub Actions), so "deploy" means: regenerate events.json, commit it, and push.

Repo: /Users/wiles/Documents/GitHub/apex-podplay-helper Live: https://chriswiles.github.io/apex-podplay-helper/

A user /loop may invoke this skill on a cadence. This skill itself schedules nothing — one invocation = one refresh-and-deploy.

Steps

Run from the repo root.

1. Record the current count (to detect suspicious drops):

   cd /Users/wiles/Documents/GitHub/apex-podplay-helper
   OLD=$(node -e "try{console.log(require('./events.json').count)}catch(e){console.log(0)}")
   

2. Scrape + rewrite events.json:

   npm run fetch
   

   The scraper (scripts/fetch-events.mjs) mints an anonymous PodPlay token, paginates the events API, retries transient failures, and throws (exit non-zero) if it scrapes fewer than 50 events — so a broken run aborts without touching good data. If this command fails, stop: do not commit, report the error.

3. Sanity-check the new count vs the old one:

   NEW=$(node -e "console.log(require('./events.json').count)")
   echo "old=$OLD new=$NEW"
   

   If NEW is 0, or dropped by more than ~40% from a non-zero OLD, treat it as suspicious: git checkout -- events.json to restore, and report instead of deploying. (A real week-over-week roll-off is gradual; a big cliff usually means an upstream change.)

4. Commit only if the data changed:

   git add events.json
   git diff --cached --quiet && echo "No change — nothing to deploy." || \
     git commit -m "chore(data): refresh sessions ($NEW events)"
   

5. Deploy (push to main):

   git push
   

   Pushing is the deploy. If a /loop runs this unattended, that is the standing authorization to push this repo. Never force-push.

6. Verify the live site picked it up — optional. This repo's GitHub Pages (legacy branch builder) lags ~7–8 minutes behind a push, so a fresh deploy won't show immediately; that's expected, not a failure.

   curl -s "https://chriswiles.github.io/apex-podplay-helper/events.json?ts=$(date +%s)" \
     | python3 -c "import sys,json; j=json.load(sys.stdin); print('live generatedAt:', j['generatedAt'], 'count:', j['count'])"
   

   Confirm generatedAt advanced to roughly now. When running unattended via /loop, skip this wait — the push is the deploy, and blocking ~8 minutes every cycle isn't worth it. Only verify manually if a deploy seems stuck.

Report

State plainly: events scraped, whether a commit/push happened (or "no change"), and the live generatedAt after deploy. If any step aborted, say which and why.

Notes

• No external dependencies; needs Node 18+ and network access.
• The scrape also pulls attendee rosters for near-term sessions that publish them (PUBLIC_ATTENDEE_LIST) — one throttled request per such event (plus a /waitlist request for full events), so a run takes ~10-30s longer. events.json gets a normalized people table (deduped [id, name]) and each event an att (signups) + optional wl (waitlist, ordered) index array. This publishes attendee names for those public sessions; that's intentional (powers the friends + "that's me" registered/waitlist features) and refreshes each run.
• events.json holds the full scrape (~900 events, count). The live site deliberately shows far fewer — the client hides sessions whose PodPlay sign-up window hasn't opened yet (regular +7d / member +14d). So the count guard in steps 1&3 tracks scrape health, not visible sessions; don't be alarmed that the site shows a few hundred while count is ~900.
• If auth or the events endpoint changes upstream, npm run fetch will fail loudly (non-zero) rather than deploy bad data — investigate scripts/fetch-events.mjs.