DSA Election Night 2025 Results Tracker

A single-page web application to track real-time election results for DSA nationally endorsed candidates.

Tech Stack

• ClojureScript - Application language
• Reagent - React wrapper for ClojureScript
• Re-frame - State management
• Shadow-CLJS - Build tool and dev server
• Bulma CSS - UI framework
• Airtable - Real-time data backend
• R2 - caching
• Github Actions - Deployment, caching updates

Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16 or higher)
• Java (for ClojureScript compiler)

Installation

npm install

Airtable Configuration

1. Follow the instructions in AIRTABLE_SCHEMA.md to set up your Airtable base
2. Create a .env file in the project root:

AIRTABLE_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
AIRTABLE_BASE_ID=your_base_id_here
AIRTABLE_TABLE_NAME=Races

Deployment

Builds to Github Pages via Github Actions. Tokens scope-limited to custom domains/read access. DNS records and CNAME set in a typical GH pages flow.

Data Caching with Cloudflare R2

Airtable limits us to 5 requests/second per base so we can't use it publicly on election night. To resolve this, we poll the Airtable and cache the results in data.json and store it on R2. Users load R2's data.json first and only fallback to Airtable's API if it fails. This is a quick cache hack because I didn't want to ssh into a server and setup an actual caching proxy or DB.

How It Works

1. Data Flow:

   • GitHub Actions fetches latest data from Airtable every 5 minutes (free tier means scheduled runs could take 15-30 minutes)
   • Data is uploaded to Cloudflare R2 bucket as data.json
   • The app fetches from R2 (or local /data.json in development)
   • App auto-refreshes data every 30 seconds

2. Local Development:

   # Fetch latest data from Airtable to local cache
   npm run fetch-airtable
   # Start dev server (uses local /data.json)
   npm start

3. Production Setup:

   The app is configured to fetch from R2 in production via the R2_DATA_URL environment variable:

   • R2 Bucket: 2025-election
   • Public URL: https://pub-83c6936810744c479bd0abe7c3146c24.r2.dev/data.json (developer link, rate-limited and should use a custom domain to remove rate-limit)
   • Update Frequency: Every 5 minutes via GitHub Actions (free tier means scheduled runs could take 15-30 minutes)

4. GitHub Secrets Required:

   Add these secrets to your repository (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions):

   • R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID - R2 API access key
   • R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - R2 API secret key
   • R2_ENDPOINT_URL - R2 endpoint URL
   • R2_BUCKET_NAME - R2 bucket name
   • AIRTABLE_API_KEY - Airtable API key
   • AIRTABLE_BASE_ID - Airtable base ID

Development

Start the development server:

npm start

The app will be available at http://localhost:8080

Hot reload is enabled - changes to ClojureScript files will update automatically.

Production Build

Build the optimized production bundle:

npm run build

The compiled output will be in public/js/main.js