Border Pulse

Reported northbound US-Mexico border waits and historical planning views at borderpulse.com. Check each lane’s report clock and the snapshot retrieval date.

Stack

• Vite + React 18 + Tailwind + shadcn/ui
• Data: U.S. Customs and Border Protection official feed (bwt.cbp.gov/api/bwtpublicmod)
• Exchange rate: exchangerate.host / open.er-api.com
• Serving: static Vite frontend, with a configured Vercel current-data endpoint and a dated bundled-data fallback; see refresh operations for deployment evidence.
• Advertising: Adsterra banner integration; Google Ads is separately gated. Integration code does not establish ad fill, approval or revenue.

Data pipeline

scripts/fetch-cbp.mjs runs on a scheduled GitHub Action. It hits the CBP JSON endpoint, accepts either English or Spanish localized border/status values, normalizes the shape, and commits public/data/crossings.json. Same cadence for public/data/exchange-rate.json.

Paid southbound Google Maps estimates are paused and are not part of the production workflow. The retained scripts/fetch-sb.mjs utility is historical/manual only; production serves the official northbound CBP feed.

The shared data service reads /api/public/crossings when the public API build flag is enabled, with a dated /data/crossings.json fallback. Static builds use the bundled snapshot. Both preserve retrieval timestamps; lane report clocks are separate. The API implementation is in api/public/crossings.js. No account is required for the free crossing reports.

The collector also materializes rolling 30-day history. Bundled frontend/history publication and current-data retrieval are separate. The existing Vercel publisher is gated by repository variables; inspect its actual run, source commit and public manifest before reporting a release. See refresh operations and the publisher workflow. Do not infer enabled, disabled, preview or production state from this checkout alone.

Local dev

npm install
npm run dev

Refresh data locally:

npm run fetch:cbp
npm run fetch:fx
# Historical paid southbound utility; guarded and not used in production:
# ALLOW_PAID_SOUTHBOUND_FETCH=yes npm run fetch:sb

Deploy

Use the existing guarded publication workflow and refresh runbook. The older Pages workflow remains in the repository; its presence does not prove which artifact serves the public host. Work on a branch, preserve publication/security gates, and obtain the owner’s explicit approval before a production release. A source commit is not a deployment.