Service Progress Update Tool

A real-time service progress update tool for The Crossing, a 4-campus church in the St. Louis area. Production staff trigger status updates ("Running Late", "Ending Early", etc.) that broadcast instantly to subscribed staff and volunteers via web push notification and a live status webpage. Designed to be faster and simpler than Teams for in-service communication.

Stack

Node.js + Express + SQLite backend; React + TypeScript + Tailwind PWA frontend; Web Push (VAPID); Server-Sent Events; JWT auth (with Rock RMS strategy); nginx reverse proxy; Docker Compose.

Quick start — local dev

Two terminals.

Backend (localhost:3000):

cd backend
cp .env.example .env
npm install
npm run migrate    # idempotent, creates tmp/dev.db
npm run seed       # seeds 4 campuses, default status types & groups, admin user
npm run dev

Frontend (localhost:5173):

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Then visit http://localhost:5173. Bootstrap admin login: admin / ChangeMeNow! (override via SEED_ADMIN_PASSWORD in backend/.env).

Quick start — production stack (Docker)

Runs on any Linux host with Docker + Docker Compose installed — bare metal, any hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox), or a cloud VM (EC2, GCE, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc.). The Crossing deploys to an Ubuntu Server LTS VM on VMware, but nothing in this stack is VMware-specific. The same docker compose --profile prod up command also runs locally on Docker Desktop (macOS / Windows) — what you verify locally is what runs in production, just rebuilt for the host architecture.

From the backend/ directory:

# Build the frontend (the prod profile mounts ../frontend/dist into nginx)
(cd ../frontend && npm ci && npm run build)

# Bring up the stack
docker compose --profile prod up -d --build

# One-shot data seed (only needed first time)
docker compose --profile seed run --rm seed

# Visit http://localhost

To stop:

docker compose --profile prod down

Data persists in the service_progress_data Docker volume between runs.

Documentation

File	What's in it
CLAUDE.md	Top-level context; auto-loaded by Claude Code; working norms for AI assistants
docs/architecture.md	Full spec — schema, API surface, frontend pages, deploy topology
docs/decisions.md	The "why" log — anchored decisions with rationale and trigger conditions for revisit
docs/operations.md	Runbook — first-time deploy, updates, backup, restore, incident response
docs/working-with-ai.md	Norms for any AI assistant (autonomy tiers, anti-patterns, memory protocol)
docs/domain/	Org-specific domain knowledge (Rock RMS, campus workflows, network topology)
BRANDING.md	How to swap the icon set and PWA branding when forking
service-status-app-prd.md	Original product requirements document

License

MIT — © 2026 The Crossing.

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Built during the Church IT Network AI Context Engineering workshop.