DST

Monorepo for the DST network: the group's own brand site, each Dubai-focused vertical it operates, and the standalone experiments. Static Astro sites, deployed independently, sharing one design system.

Feature groups

A site is mostly defined by which of these it switches on. Each group is a set of components in packages/ui that only make sense together — a site takes the whole group or none of it.

• Feed — the news and events spine: NewsBlock / NewsList / NewsArticle, EventsBlock / EventsList / EventArticle, and the FeedCards they all render through. Brings /go/ outbound hops (Redirect) and .ics calendar files with it. Every site but musical, which publishes runs rather than a feed.
• Lead capture — LeadForm, LeadTracking, Callout, Faq. The route from a reader to a qualified enquiry, on the verticals where DKEY executes.
• District — DistrictHub, ContentPage, VenuePage, VenueCard, DistrictRentForm, and the DistrictLayout that replaces BaseLayout on these sites. A neighbourhood covered block by block: venues, amenities, and what it costs to live there.
• Media — Photo, PhotoCredit, Lightbox, and district/PhotoHero. Licensed photography with its credit attached; a site without pictures it may use does not switch this on.
• Wayfinding — Breadcrumbs, OnThisPage, Glance, MapEmbed, CountdownScript. For sites deep enough that a reader can get lost in them.
• Portfolio — VentureGrid. A grid of what the operator runs, with live/in-development status.

The sites

App	Domain	What it is	Feature groups
dst	dst.llc	The group's brand site — the systems behind the ventures	Feed, Portfolio, Lead capture, Wayfinding
llc	llc.dst.llc	Starting a business in Dubai: mainland, free zone, offshore	Feed, Lead capture
visas	visas.dst.llc	UAE residency routes, employment through Golden Visa	Feed, Lead capture
riviera	riviera.dst.llc	Azizi Riviera, block by block	Feed, District
mbr	mbr.dst.llc	MBR City, block by block	Feed, District
palmcentral	palmcentral.dst.llc	Palm Central by Nakheel — pricing, payment plan, eligibility	Feed, Lead capture, Media
eco	eco.dst.llc	The eco portfolio: funded environmental initiatives	Feed, Portfolio, Lead capture, Media
api	api.dst.llc	Serverless endpoints. Not an Astro site — no UI at all	—
fwf	fwf.lol	Independent guide to one conference: Future World Forum Dubai	Feed, Lead capture, Media, Wayfinding
musical	musical.today	Musicals city by city — venues, runs, and who is actually selling	Lead capture, District, Media, Wayfinding, Portfolio
nyc42	nyc42.lol	What's on in New York City	Feed
ldn	ldn.lol	What's on in central London	Feed
lnd	lnd.lol	Greater London, beyond the centre	Feed
cmx	cmx.lol	Qué hacer en la Ciudad de México	Feed
mxo	mxo.lol	La agenda de México	Feed
sol2go	sol2go.lol	Solana meetups, hackathons and the crypto calendar	Feed
vien	vien.lol	Was in Wien los ist — Wien und Österreich, auf Deutsch	Feed

Two things the table does not show and that the code enforces:

• The five .lol sites are independent. They carry no link to dst.llc and none to each other. They are year-long experiments with their own domains, sharing the code and nothing else. musical.today is separate from the group in the same way, down to its own publisher in the structured data.
• cmx and mxo publish in Spanish. They render lang="es-MX" and pass a Spanish label set from their own content.ts into the shared components (packages/ui/src/labels.ts). Everything else in the network takes the English defaults.

Two home-page shapes

Every home page in the network ends with the same two blocks, in one of two orders. Which order is not a style choice — it answers what the reader came for:

• A — agenda. EventsBlock, then NewsBlock. For sites whose subject is dated: dst, riviera, mbr, fwf, and the five .lol city sites. What is on soon outranks what was filed recently.
• B — advisory. NewsBlock, then EventsBlock. For sites whose subject is a rule or a purchase: llc, visas, eco, palmcentral. A reader there wants what changed before they want a date.

Both blocks render their own <section class="container">. Call them bare — wrapping one in another .container doubles the gutter and pushes the feed in from the grid the rest of the page sits on.

Working on a site

npm install
npm run dev:nyc42     # dev:<app> for any app in the table
npm run build         # every app
npm run build:nyc42   # build:<app> for one

Tests run against the build output, so build first:

npm run test:html && npm run test:links && npm run test:schema && npm run test:images && npm run test:network

Anything touching packages/ui is a change to every site — check them all visually, not just the one you were working on:

node tools/visual-check.mjs <url> --widths 390,944,1280 --scheme both

Pictures

set -a && . ~/dst/.env && set +a       # FAL_AI_API_KEY
node tools/covers.mjs --dry            # what is missing, and what it costs
node tools/covers.mjs && node tools/images.mjs

Spend is capped at a dollar a day by tools/fal-budget.mjs, which reserves before each request and refuses the one that would cross the line — the run stops there rather than carrying on with the cheaper half of a set. The running total is tools/fal-spend.json, one line per day, committed. Raising the ceiling means editing LIMIT and committing that, on purpose; there is no environment variable for it.

Shipping

npm run pipeline                         # llms.txt, build, dates, rebuild what moved
./tools/deploy.sh nyc42                  # one site, or --all

pipeline is the two generated files and the builds they need, in the one order that works: llms.txt is written into public/ and has to exist before the build that copies it, while lastmod.json is computed by walking dist/ and so needs a build before it and another after. Done in that order a ship costs two builds; done with llms.mjs last it costs three, which is the easy mistake to make from a cold tree, because lastmod.mjs refuses to run without dist/ and invites you to build first.

Neither build is the whole network if it does not have to be. The first skips the sites nothing touched, comparing input hashes against node_modules/.cache/dst-pipeline.json; the second skips the sites whose dates did not move. What counts as an input is drawn from what the sources actually read: a site's own packages/content/src/{events,news}/<app>.ts, plus — for dst alone, the one page in the network that aggregates — every site's. A change to packages/ui or to the shared content modules rebuilds all seventeen. lastmod.json is deliberately not an input, because the second pass already decides who needs rebuilding for it. DST_BUILD_ALL=1 ignores the cache.

Measured: nothing changed, 7s; one site's page, 10s; a content entry (that site and the hub), 10s; everything, 28s. The ceiling — all seventeen rebuilt in both passes — is about 50s on an idle machine, and two to three times that when it is paging.

Builds run four at a time, straight through node rather than through npm run build --workspace, which costs about half a second an app in npm's own startup, with Astro's telemetry off. Four is the measured knee on this machine: seventeen apps take 35.7s one at a time, 20.6s at four, and 25.2s at eight, where the swap file grows half a gigabyte in a run and it pages instead of building. Concurrency here is a memory budget, not a core count — set DST_BUILD_LANES=1 when something else big is resident. See tools/pipeline.mjs.

deploy.sh exists because a push rebuilds every app the commit touched, and a packages/ change touches all fifteen — against a Hobby limit of 100 builds a day. Use --force when a build fails with no error of its own right after "Restored build cache from previous deployment".

The 16:20 digest

python3 tools/ga-report.py --dry-run     # print it, send nothing
python3 tools/ga-report.py --period week

One GA4 digest a day to Telegram, from a cron entry at 16:20. The period picks itself rather than living in the crontab: the first Friday of a month reports the month, any other Friday the week, every other day the last 24 hours. A monthly Friday does not also send a weekly one.

The daily one is read by dateHour and bucketed into the trailing 24 hours against the 24 before them — a digest sent at 16:20 cannot compare a part-day against a whole one without printing a minus sign every afternoon. tools/ga.py remains the wide table for reading at a terminal.

Adding a vertical

1. Copy the shape of an existing app with the same feature groups — nyc42 for a plain feed site, riviera for a district, llc for a lead-capture vertical.

2. Write its src/site.config.ts: the site's name, its title suffix, its language, its publisher, and whether it names DST in the footer. That file is the whole of what a copied app must not inherit, which is why it is a file and not props in Layout.astro — the layout is copied, the config is written. A test rejects a layout that sets any of it itself.

3. Add dev:<name> / build:<name> to the root package.json and include the app in the root build script.

4. Give it an accent in src/styles/theme.css and a palette in tools/covers.json — a site without one cannot generate covers. The accent is two palettes and nothing else:

   :root {
     --accent-light: …; --accent-ink-light: …; --accent-tint-light: …;
     --accent-dark:  …; --accent-ink-dark:  …; --accent-tint-dark:  …;
   }

   Which one applies is tokens.css's job, not the site's. Don't write a [data-theme] rule here — the switch has three states, the third is easy to get wrong, and a test rejects a theme.css that reimplements it.

5. Add it to SITES in tools/deploy.sh, and to the table above.

6. Cross-link it from apps/dst and related verticals — unless it is a .lol experiment, which links to nothing in the network.

See ~/mind/ai/dubai/seo/guidelines.md and the per-vertical concept docs under ~/mind/ai/dubai/*.dst.llc.md for content and SEO direction — this repo is code, not the source of truth for site strategy.

Ticket prices

node tools/prices.mjs <tsv> reads what sellers advertise off their own pages and prints it. It writes nothing: prices go into runs.ts by hand, because a wrong one is the only error on this site a reader finds out about at the till.

It trusts two sources unequally. A schema.org Offer in the seller's own JSON-LD, on an event whose name matches the show, is written as-is — sellers publish one per performance, so the figure taken is the minimum across them. A "from £25" in the visible text is flagged for a human instead: on the first pass three of nine such matches were a group discount ("£5 off"), a membership fee ("Join now from £35") and a schools rate, none of them a price anyone could buy a seat at.

Prices expire. PRICE_STALE_DAYS in apps/musical/src/rules.ts is 42 days; past that the number leaves the page and the markup rather than ageing on them, and priceValidUntil publishes the same date to search engines. A site rebuilt weekly cannot promise a live price, so it promises a dated one.

Sites behind a bot check are reported as blocked. We do not try to get past one.