Regress

A location-based capture game in the spirit of Ingress, built as a nostr-native web app. Real Bitcoin-accepting businesses from BTC Map stand in for Ingress's portals — players physically visit them to claim them for their team (orange or green), then link claimed places into triangular control fields. First scope: Madeira, Portugal.

See DESIGN.md for the full research/design writeup.

Stack

• server/ — Fastify + better-sqlite3 + nostr-tools (TypeScript), same pattern as podsteadr.
• frontend/ — Vue 3 + Vite + Pinia + Tailwind + Leaflet.
• Auth is NIP-98 (signed-event login → session cookie), same as podsteadr. frontend/public/nostr-provider.js is vendored so the app can also be launched identity-aware from inside an Archipelago dashboard, the same way as podsteadr — see that repo's README for how the registration side works.

Running locally

# server
cd server
npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:8096

# frontend (separate terminal)
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev         # http://localhost:5173, proxies /api to :8096

On first run, the places table is empty — call POST /api/sync (or click "Sync from BTC Map" in the UI) to pull the current Madeira dataset from BTC Map's public API.

Game rules (v0)

• Claiming or linking from a place requires being within CLAIM_RADIUS_METERS (default 40m) of it, via browser geolocation — no claiming from the couch.
• Claiming an enemy-held place captures it for your team and tears down any links running through it.
• A link can be created between any two places your team currently holds, as long as you're standing at the origin place — no maximum link distance.
• A new link can't cross any existing link (either team) — same as Ingress. Links sharing an endpoint don't count as crossing. See services/geo.ts#segmentsIntersect and routes/links.ts.
• Three mutually-linked, same-team places form a field (computed live, not stored) — see server/src/services/fields.ts.
• Team choice is one-way once made.

Tests

cd server
npm test

Deployment

Live at https://podsteadr.atobitcoin.io/regress/ — same public host as podsteadr, reached via a path prefix under the existing domain/cert rather than its own subdomain (no DNS access to add one). Migrated here from an earlier archy-x250-dev3 trial deploy (Tailscale-only Archipelago node) — see git history for that phase.

• Single container (Dockerfile, server + built frontend in one image), podman run --restart unless-stopped, data bind-mounted at /var/lib/archipelago/regress-data on the host, internal port 8199 (bound to 127.0.0.1 only — nginx is the only way in).
• deploy/nginx-podsteadr-regress.conf — the location /regress/ block added to podsteadr's existing nginx site.

Path-prefix deployment (ROUTE_PREFIX / VITE_BASE)

Since / on this domain is already podsteadr, Regress needed to support being served from a path prefix — this took two coordinated changes, both required together:

1. Frontend build: VITE_BASE=/regress/ (Vite's base config) so built asset URLs and the vendored nostr-provider.js script tag/data attributes (via %BASE_URL% in index.html) resolve under the prefix.
2. Backend runtime: ROUTE_PREFIX=/regress env var — every route (including /api/health) is registered under this prefix via Fastify's plugin-encapsulation { prefix } option (app.ts).

The nginx location must forward the full prefixed path unchanged — do NOT strip it, unlike podsteadr's own /player/, /hls/, etc. blocks which all strip their prefix (proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:PORT/; with a trailing slash). Regress's NIP-98 login signs the exact URL it's about to call, prefix included (frontend/src/lib/api.ts#apiUrl); if nginx stripped the prefix before forwarding, the backend would reconstruct a different (unprefixed) URL to check the signature against, and every login would fail with "u tag does not match the request URL". So the location block uses proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8199; — no trailing path at all — which tells nginx to forward the original URI verbatim, prefix included. This is covered by server/src/routePrefix.test.ts, including a negative test that a signed-for-the-unprefixed-URL login is correctly rejected (proving the prefix check is real, not accidentally bypassed).

Deploying at root (no prefix) needs neither variable — both default to ''/'/'.

Migrating the SQLite database between hosts

The whole game state (places/claims/links/users) is one file, regress.sqlite3. To move it: stop the container, copy the file (plus its -wal/-shm siblings if present, or checkpoint first), start the new container pointed at the copy. No export/import tooling needed — see git history for the exact commands used for the archy-x250-dev3 → podsteadr machine move.

To redeploy after a code change: git pull in /var/lib/archipelago/regress-src on the host, then:

podman build --build-arg VITE_BASE=/regress/ --build-arg ROUTE_PREFIX=/regress \
  -t localhost/regress:latest .
podman run -d --name regress-app --replace --restart unless-stopped \
  -p 127.0.0.1:8199:8199 \
  -v /var/lib/archipelago/regress-data:/data \
  -e ROUTE_PREFIX=/regress \
  -e PUBLIC_URL=https://podsteadr.atobitcoin.io \
  localhost/regress:latest