doxa-maps — one build, maps that embed everywhere

A Vite bundler that turns each map into a self-contained web component. Write a map in plugin-designs/<your-map>/, run one build, and get a folder you can drop on any host — iframe it, script-embed it, wrap it as a mobile app, or open every map at once as one SPA.

This README has three parts, in the order you need them:

1. The 5 plugin capabilities — what you can build, simplest to richest.
2. The 5 deployment methods — where a plugin can run.
3. The Plugin Studio — ★ where you work. Start here if you are new.

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1. The 5 plugin capabilities

A "capability" is how much a plugin nests — not how hard it is. Every screenshot below is a real bundle from this repo's build output.

#	Capability	What it is	Example bundle
1	Single element	One folder → one bundle → one custom element.	all-people-groups
2	Prop-table element	One root.vue + a preset table → many maps from one plugin.	doxa-simple-map
3	Monolithic element	One root.vue nests many views internally → one element.	doxa-research-map
4	Nested-element SPA	A composite that nests other plugins and wires them with props/events.	big-picture
5	Nested-SPA / app shell	Many SPAs nested into one deep-linkable app.	doxa-maps-spa

The tier is decided by the files, not by how simple a folder looks: an *.instances.json makes a bundle cap-2 however light it is, and a meta.json type declares tiers 3/4/5. The authoritative, generated answer lives in documentation/reference-capability-exemplars.md — cite that file rather than remembering.

Capability 1 — single element

One folder, one .vue, one embeddable element. plugin-designs/all-people-groups/ shows every people group on one map.

Capability 2 — prop-table element

One root.vue, many maps. plugin-designs/doxa-simple-map/ ships a preset prop-table (simple-map.instances.json) that renders it three ways — each a standalone embeddable page from the same code.

Prayer	Engagement	Adoption

Capability 3 — monolithic element

A whole multi-view map from one root.vue. The trade-off: you cannot embed just one of its tabs.

Capability 4 — nested-element SPA

A composite that nests lower-tier plugins and wires them with props and events. Each inner plugin stays independently embeddable, and the composite is embeddable too. plugin-designs/my-upg-100-list/ ships three leaves:

Composite (upg-100-mfe)	List (upg-100-list)	Poster wall (poster-wall)

Capability 5 — nested-SPA / app shell

Every plugin in one deep-linkable page. Two cap-5 apps ship, and the difference matters when you embed one: doxa-maps-spa is what an end user gets; plugin-studio is what a developer works in.

doxa-maps-spa — the curated product SPA, with tabs grouped by audience.

plugin-studio — the developer studio, grouping every built plugin by capability (5 → 1). It is auto-generated: the build discovers every folder in plugin-designs/, so a new plugin appears in the studio without any wiring. This is section 3.

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2. The 5 deployment methods

Ordered easiest to hardest. Status is stated honestly — "proven" means it has been run and seen, and nothing below is upgraded past what the files support.

#	Method	Status	Command / install
1	iframe on any site	✅ proven	bun run build, then paste the embed.iframe snippet from manifest.json
2	Mobile app (Capacitor, Android)	🛠️ built, not shot	bun run check:mobile (no toolchain) · bun run phone needs Android SDK + JDK 17 + adb
3	JavaScript embed (<script src> + SRI)	✅ proven	bun run build, then paste the embed.script + integrity snippet
4	WordPress plugin (shortcode + block)	🛠️ built, contract-proven, not shot	bun run check:wp-embed, then install deployment/wordpress/doxa-maps-embed/
5	Desktop app (Tauri)	🛠️ built, not shot	bun run check:tauri (no toolchain) · cargo tauri build needs Rust + webview libs

What "not shot" means: the code exists and its contract test passes, but nobody has captured it running on a real device or install. Each is blocked by a missing local toolchain, not by missing code — Android SDK for method 2, a live WordPress for method 4, and a GUI (this box is headless) for method 5.

Methods 1 and 3 are the two proven-live paths. If you need a map on a site today, use one of those.

The full per-method command matrix, with every prerequisite, is in documentation/README-SECTION-3-cli-commands.md.

The Mapbox token (read this before you file a bug)

The maps use Mapbox, which needs a pk. token. The token works differently in dev than in the built tree, and diagnosing one from the other is the most common way to lose an hour.

Where	How it gets a token
Dev server (bun run dev)	Baked into the page for you — from .env (VITE_MAPBOX_TOKEN) if present, otherwise from token in vite.doxa-maps-build-config.json.
Built pages (bun run serve, or hosted)	Not baked. Each page resolves a token at runtime: ?tk=<TOKEN> on the URL, a token you paste into the page's own input box (kept in localStorage), or a token endpoint (tokenUrl).

So on a built leaf page you typically need:

http://localhost:4173/doxa-maps/demo-map/demo-map/index.html?tk=pk.your_token_here

To use your own token in dev, create a .env — it is gitignored (.gitignore lines 21-24), so it never reaches the repo:

printf 'VITE_MAPBOX_TOKEN=%s\n' 'pk.your_token_here' > .env

If a basemap is an empty grey void while the pins still draw, that is the token failing — not a broken app.

Why this is genuinely awkward: the five deployment methods each handle the token differently, and a JAMstack embed has nowhere safe to keep a secret. The answer is not to hide the token but to make hiding it unnecessary: a public pk. token is restricted to specific URLs in the Mapbox dashboard. MapLibre is being pursued to remove the per-embed token requirement entirely — that work is IN PROGRESS, not done (maplibre-gl is a dependency and the page generator has a MapLibre path, but no plugin-design runs on it yet).

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3. The Plugin Studio

★ This is where you work — and the keyword is INTEROPERABILITY.

The Plugin Studio is one place to view all of your plugins at once and edit all of them in one place using your agent. Every plugin appears in a single view, sorted highest capability down to lowest, so you can see the whole catalogue instead of hunting through folders.

That sorting is the point. Once you can see every plugin side by side, you can tell your agent which ones to group together — any number of them — and compose them into higher-capability plugins using props, events and layouts. Group cap-1 and cap-2 elements and you get a cap-4 nested-element SPA; group those and you get a cap-5 app shell. That is what makes the studio the right place to build map plugins, rather than a gallery you merely look at.

Why this matters. Without a working studio, a developer sees the fruit but not the deeper strategy — they get the maps, but they cannot reproduce or extend them. The studio is what turns a set of finished maps into something you can build on.

Get it running

Four steps from nothing to every map in one place.

# 1. Clone (the repo root IS the studio — there is no subfolder to cd into).
#    This host is PRIVATE: it will prompt for your Forgejo username + token.
git clone --branch doxa-maps-plugin-studio https://git.nuxtbase.app/doxa-life/doxa-maps.git
cd doxa-maps

# 2. Install dependencies (installs 206 packages; needs Node >= 18)
bun install --frozen-lockfile

# 3. Optional — your own Mapbox token for dev (see section 2)
printf 'VITE_MAPBOX_TOKEN=%s\n' 'pk.your_token_here' > .env

# 4. Open the Plugin Studio
bun run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173/ — that root URL is the Plugin Studio, with every plugin in one spot. (If port 5173 is busy Vite picks another one and prints it; read the line it logs.)

You do not need to build first. The build output in public/ is committed, so a fresh clone has plugins to show the moment the dev server starts.

If step 1 fails with remote: Unauthorized, the clone is not broken — git.nuxtbase.app is a private self-hosted Forgejo and anonymous cloning is refused. Ask for an account, then use your username plus a Forgejo access token (not your password) when git prompts.

Two things worth knowing:

• / is the studio; /__gallery is the old staging gallery, kept but demoted to an explicit URL.
• Edits hot-reload. The studio mounts the real plugin-studio custom element through its own index.js — the same path the built bundle takes — so what you see is the real element, not a preview.

Work with your agent

The studio's companion is your coding agent. The loop:

1. Open the studio (bun run dev) and look at the catalogue, sorted cap-5 → cap-1.
2. Tell your agent which plugins to group — e.g. "combine the research map and the people-groups grid into one composite."
3. The agent writes a new folder in plugin-designs/<name>/, wiring the children with props, events and a layout from library/layouts/.
4. Refresh the studio. The new, higher-capability plugin is there.

The whole contract is: write your app inside plugin-designs/<your-map>/. There is no registration step and no per-plugin wiring — the build discovers every folder under plugin-designs/. Copy plugin-designs/template-bundle/ to start a new one.

Two shared layouts do the composing, both in library/layouts/:

• VerticalTabsLayout — one element visible at a time, lazy-mounted on first open.
• StackLayout — the opposite: elements stacked top-to-bottom at natural height, so the page scrolls through them.

Working fast: use the dev server, not the build

A full bun run build rebuilds every bundle and takes minutes. You do not need it to see a change. The dev server hot-reloads:

bun run dev                      # http://localhost:5173
bun x vite --port 5299 --strictPort   # any other port, when 5173 is taken

★ If more than one of you is working in this repo at once, EVERY dev server must name its own port, and must pass --strictPort. Vite's default behaviour on a busy port is to silently move to the next one — 5173 becomes 5174 — and five gates (check-facet-changes-map, plugin-gallery-smoke, smoke-studio, generate-gallery, check-scrim-covers-viewport) have 5173 written into them. A second server without --strictPort therefore leaves those gates talking to somebody else's server, or to none, and reporting a confident wrong answer with no error. With --strictPort the duplicate exits non-zero instead of drifting — verified: port taken → exit 1.

Reach for the full build only when you need the deployable tree, an SRI-consistent leaf page, or a manifest. To check one bundle's compiled output without touching anyone else's:

BUNDLE=<name> bun x vite build   # this bundle only; does NOT clean the tree

Everything must reach Forgejo

A local commit is invisible. The Driver runs a laptop watcher against git.nuxtbase.app/doxa-life/doxa-maps and sees changes in the browser from THAT repo — so work that stops at git commit has not been delivered, no matter how well it was verified locally.

Push every increment:

TOKEN="$(pass show vivarium/forgejo-certified-sandbox | head -1)"
git -c http.postBuffer=524288000 \
    push "https://oauth2:${TOKEN}@git.nuxtbase.app/doxa-life/doxa-maps.git" HEAD:doxa-maps-plugin-studio \
    2>&1 | sed "s/${TOKEN}/[REDACTED]/g"
unset TOKEN

Never write the credential into .git/config (see the clone note above), always filter output through sed, and prefer many small pushed commits over one large local one.

★ After pushing to an INLINE url, git log @{u}.. still reports the commits as unpushed, because git only moves a remote-tracking ref when it pushes to a NAMED remote. Sync it so the next reader is not misled:

git fetch "https://oauth2:${TOKEN}@git.nuxtbase.app/doxa-life/doxa-maps.git" \
    'refs/heads/doxa-maps-plugin-studio:refs/remotes/origin/doxa-maps-plugin-studio'

The production build

The dev server is for working. When you want the deployable tree:

bun run build     # ~4 minutes; writes public/doxa-maps/
bun run serve     # serve the BUILT tree at http://localhost:4173

bun run build takes a lock: if another build is already running it fails fast rather than corrupting the shared output. Set BUILD_LOCK_WAIT=600 to queue behind it instead.

Before you MEASURE the built tree — bun run check:settled

bun run check:settled   # exit 0 = safe to measure/publish; exit 1 = do not

The lock protects a second WRITER. It does not protect a READER. Every build begins with bun run clean, which rm -rfs public/doxa-maps/, so while a build runs the tree is transiently near-empty — and anything reading it then gets a confident, wrong answer: "that bundle is missing", "the dashboard tab does not exist", "461 files were deleted". Those are not hypotheticals; each has happened here, and one nearly produced a bug report against a correct change.

So run this gate before any browser check, any publish, and any claim about what the tree contains. It reports builders, waiters, churn(45s), dirs, leaves and quietFor, and grade it by exit code — like every gate here, it prints teaching prose after its verdict, so | tail -1 will mislead you.

★ Do not substitute a pgrep check for this. A process list samples an INSTANT; the lock knows the QUEUE. Between one queued build finishing and the next acquiring the lock there is a real window where zero build processes exist and the tree is nonetheless about to be wiped — and a long quiet period makes that window look more convincing, not less, because the queue is idle precisely because it is between runs. Measured 2026-09-23: pgrep reported 0 builders while the gate reported builders=1 waiters=1, and ps confirmed a build had started 17 seconds earlier.

If you are one of several agents working this repo at once, the stronger rule is simply: do not run bun run build at all. Edit source, and let one owner run the single authoritative build. To sanity-check one bundle without touching anyone else's output, use BUNDLE=<name> bun x vite build — it does not clean the whole tree.

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Repository layout

Two directories matter to a plugin author:

plugin-designs/     ← YOUR FREE ZONE. One folder per plugin. Copy template-bundle/ to start.
library/            ← the SHARED toolkit (layouts, components, composables, colors, stores, i18n).

Everything else is supporting cast: internal/ (build + gates), public/ (committed build output), deployment/ (Capacitor, WordPress, Tauri), documentation/.

plugin-designs/ is a free zone. Your plugin is its own application in its own folder, building to its own output. Nothing you do there can break another author's map.

library/ is a HIGH BAR. It is multi-tenant — reused by many maps and authors — so every edit is a breaking-change risk to everyone. Only contribute here when a component is genuinely reusable and parameterized, so other maps can use it. Never widen or casually add. Keep map-specific, non-parameterized code in your own plugin-design.

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More docs

Read this	When
documentation/develop-a-plugin-and-see-it-live.md	★ the golden path — zero to a plugin live, in 6 steps
documentation/README-SECTION-3-cli-commands.md	the full per-method CLI + install matrix
documentation/reference-capability-exemplars.md	which bundle is the capability-N example (generated)
documentation/reference-library-index.md	the menu of reusable library/ pieces you can import
documentation/why.md	2 min — the problem, the idea, one diagram
documentation/tutorial.md	build your first map, step by step
documentation/how-to.md	task recipes (embed, data, mobile)
documentation/architecture/	the deep end — embeddability, app-wrappers, file map

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Bottom line: maps should be open source, run everywhere, and multiply. This bundler makes each map a self-contained file that embeds on your site, your partners' sites, WordPress, and mobile — from one build. The Plugin Studio is where you compose them into something bigger.