Camp Finder

A free, static website that helps Scout troops discover Scouts BSA resident summer camps across the ~230 Scouting America councils — filter by distance, program, and features — and click through to each camp's official council page for dates and fees.

Unofficial community tool. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Scouting America (Boy Scouts of America). Camp Finder is a directory and a pointer to authoritative sources; always confirm dates and fees on the council's own page.

Planning & specs: PLAN.md · IMPLEMENTATION.md · DESIGN_BRIEF.md · agent guide: CLAUDE.md.

Architecture

Camp and council data comes from the Open Scout API — an open, versioned dataset of Scouting America reference data. A small refresh step (web/scripts/build-data.mjs) fetches the API's denormalized current/camps.json + vocabularies, filters to the camps this site surfaces, and writes static JSON to web/public/data/. An Astro + React static site (web/) loads that JSON and filters entirely client-side — no backend, no runtime database.

Open Scout API (current/camps.json + vocab)  --(npm run data)-->  web/public/data/*.json  -->  Astro static site

Registry only. The site carries durable registry facts — location, council, program, features, reservation grouping, and a durable link to the council page. Highly transitory data (session dates, fees, availability) deliberately lives on each council's own site, reached via each camp's url.

Data (web/scripts/build-data.mjs)

The emitted JSON is committed so the site deploys from a clean checkout with no network. Refreshing it is a deliberate step, pinned to an API version:

cd web
npm run data      # fetch open-scout-api -> web/public/data/{camps,meta,vocab}.json

The pinned API version lives in EXPECTED_VERSION at the top of build-data.mjs; a version mismatch fails the refresh loudly so changes are reviewed before they land. zip-centroids.json (US Census ZCTA gazetteer, public domain) is committed and static.

Web (web/)

Requires Node.js 20+ (LTS).

cd web
npm install
npm run dev       # local dev server
npm run build     # static output -> web/dist (deployed by CI)
npm run test      # vitest: distance, filter, format, searchParams
npm run check     # astro type-check

The site reads web/public/data/*.json, produced by npm run data and committed so the site deploys from a clean checkout.

Status

• Live data source: Open Scout API (v0.58.1) — 445 camps across ~211 councils and 52 states/territories, classified by program and camp type, with reservation grouping, coordinate precision, elevation, avg July temperatures, and surveyed camp features (128-term vocab).
• Frontend: search/map/filter island (distance, state, July temperature, program, features, text), reservation-clustered map, static camp pages, a /compare side-by-side view, about, 404 — built against the approved design system.