Scholars Profile System

A profile system for researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. Phase 1 replacement for VIVO.

Status

Local prototype under active development. See the planning artifacts in ~/Dropbox/Index/Scholars Profile System : VIVO Replacement/ (functional spec, charter, design decisions, build plan) for context.

Stack

Layer	Local	Production target
Framework	Next.js 15 (App Router)	Same, on Fargate
Language	TypeScript (strict)	Same
Database	MySQL 8 (Docker)	Aurora MySQL on RDS
Search	OpenSearch 2.x (Docker)	OpenSearch Service (managed)
ETL	TypeScript via tsx	Lambda + EventBridge
Styling	Tailwind 4 + shadcn/ui	Same
Testing	Vitest + Playwright	Same
CI	GitHub Actions	Same

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22+
• Docker (with at least 4GB allocated for OpenSearch)
• npm 10+

Local setup

# 1. Clone
git clone https://github.com/wcmc-its/Scholars-Profile-System.git
cd Scholars-Profile-System

# 2. Install
npm install

# 3. Copy env template (real credentials live in ~/.zshrc, never committed)
cp .env.example .env.local

# 4. Start MySQL + OpenSearch
npm run db:up

# 5. Run dev server
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Useful commands

npm run dev          # Next.js dev server (Turbopack)
npm run build        # Production build
npm run lint         # ESLint
npm run typecheck    # tsc --noEmit
npm run test         # Vitest unit tests
npm run test:e2e     # Playwright E2E (requires dev server)
npm run format       # Prettier
npm run db:up        # Start MySQL + OpenSearch via docker compose
npm run db:down      # Stop the local containers

Project layout

app/                  # Next.js App Router
  (public)/           # Unauthenticated routes (Phase 2+)
  (authenticated)/    # SAML-gated routes (Phase 7)
  api/                # API route handlers (decision #1: API-first via Next.js)
components/           # UI components (shadcn/ui-derived)
lib/                  # Shared utilities (slug, db, search, url-resolver)
prisma/               # Schema and migrations (Phase 1)
etl/                  # Source-system pipelines (Phase 4)
seed/                 # Synthetic seed data
tests/
  unit/               # Vitest
  e2e/                # Playwright
docs/                 # ADRs and reference docs

Security

• Credentials live in ~/.zshrc as env vars and are referenced via process.env.*. Never hardcoded.
• .env* files are gitignored. The .env.example documents required variables but contains no real values.
• Real WCM faculty data and CWIDs must never be committed to this public repo.

Contributing

Work happens in phases per the build plan. One commit per logical step; commits never include AI attribution. CI must be green before merge to master.