FlightMeet

A community platform for paraglider pilots: find flying meets, team up in groups, chat, and check launch-site weather.

Features • Architecture • Getting started • Documentation

Overview

FlightMeet helps pilots organize shared flying days. Browse upcoming flying meets by region and experience level, join with one click, coordinate in flight groups and chat, and check the weather forecast for any launch site before you commit, all in one place.

The app is a decoupled two-tier application living in a single repository:

• frontend/: a React 19 single-page application (Vite + TypeScript) that renders all UI.
• app/: a CodeIgniter 4 backend that serves a JSON-only API under /api/* (no server-rendered HTML).

Features

• Meet discovery: all flying meets as cards with title, flying spot, region, date and time, experience level, participant count, and open/full status. Instant search (title, spot, region, description) combined with region and experience-level filters.
• Join / leave: one-click participation with immediate UI feedback; full meets are locked automatically. Participant counts and meet status are always derived, never stored.
• Meet management: create and edit meets with validation, pick the flying spot on an interactive map.
• Flight groups: regional and interest-based groups pilots can join, each with its own chat channel.
• Chat: a global pilot channel plus per-group channels, available as a full page or a popover launcher on every page.
• Weather: Open-Meteo powered forecasts with geocoding search, wind visualization, and pilot-submitted weather reports on a map (Leaflet with marker clustering).
• Accounts & profiles: registration and session login via CodeIgniter Shield, public pilot profiles, and a role model with user, moderator, and admin groups.
• Admin dashboard: user management with server-side paging, search, filtering, and sorting (TanStack Table).
• Landing page: an animated FlightMeet showcase built with GSAP scroll animations.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────┐        HTTP / JSON        ┌──────────────────────────┐
│  React SPA (frontend/)  │  ───────────────────────► │  CodeIgniter 4 (app/)    │
│  React 19 + Vite + TS   │   /api/*  (fetch, cookies)│  PHP 8.2, JSON-API-only  │
│  react-router-dom, TSX  │  ◄─────────────────────── │  Shield auth, MariaDB    │
└─────────────────────────┘                           └──────────────────────────┘
         built into  public/  ◄── same origin in prod ──►  served by Apache/CI

Frontend: React 19, TypeScript, Vite, react-router-dom v7, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn components on Base UI, Phosphor icons, TanStack Table, GSAP, Leaflet.

Backend: CodeIgniter 4.7 on PHP 8.2, CodeIgniter Shield for session-based auth with CSRF protection, MariaDB, Open-Meteo as the weather and geocoding provider.

In production the SPA is compiled into public/ and served from the same origin as the API: public/.htaccess routes api/* to CodeIgniter and every other path to the SPA's index.html, where React Router takes over.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• PHP 8.2+ with the intl and mysqlnd extensions
• Composer
• Node.js 20+ and pnpm
• A MariaDB/MySQL server (e.g. via XAMPP)

Setup

1. Install dependencies

   composer install
   cd frontend && pnpm install && cd ..

2. Configure the environment

   Copy env to .env and set your database credentials (database.default.*). The default database name is db_team11.

3. Create the schema and sample data

   php spark migrate --all
   php spark db:seed FlightMeetSeeder

   The seeder creates sample pilots, meets, groups, and chat messages.

Run in development

Start the API and the frontend dev server in two terminals:

# Terminal 1: CodeIgniter API on http://localhost:8080
php spark serve --host localhost --port 8080

# Terminal 2: Vite dev server with HMR on http://localhost:5173
cd frontend && pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:5173. The Vite dev server proxies /api and /media to the backend; override the target with CI_BACKEND_URL in frontend/.env.local if port 8080 is taken.

Build for production

cd frontend && pnpm build

This compiles the SPA into public/, ready to be served by Apache alongside the CodeIgniter API.

Important

A frontend source change only appears in the served app after pnpm build. In development, use the Vite server instead; the public/ build is for production only.

Documentation

Document	Contents
docs/SPECIFICATION.md	Functional requirements for the FlightMeet platform
docs/API_FLIGHTMEET.md	JSON API contract for meets, groups, and chat
docs/AUTH.md	Auth and permissions model (Shield, roles, CSRF)
CLAUDE.md	Architecture overview and coding conventions