The marketing site - HackUTD Docs

Every hackathon needs a public website, and it should look different every year. Harp’s answer is a deliberately minimal Next.js marketing template: a scaffold whose design you replace each iteration, built around a data layer you keep forever.

The template, in two layers

Layer	What it is	What you do with it
Design (`app/`)	A basic page that proves the backend connection and shows what the public API returns	Replace it entirely with your year’s themed design
Data (`lib/`)	The API client, TypeScript types mirroring the Go structs, and formatting helpers	Keep it

How it talks to Harp

The site fetches live schedule, sponsor, and FAQ data from the public content API:

Requests carry an X-API-Key header that must match the PUBLIC_API_KEY configured on the Go service.
All fetches are server-only (Server Components). Importing the API client into a client component fails the build, and the site can’t be a static export.
Responses revalidate about every 5 minutes, so organizer edits in the portal reach the public site without a rebuild.

Environment

Variable	Purpose
`HARP_API_BASE_URL`	Your Go service’s base URL, no trailing slash
`HARP_PUBLIC_API_KEY`	Must match `PUBLIC_API_KEY` on the Go service

Deploying

The site deploys to Vercel as its own project, independent of the portal and backend. Set both environment variables for Production and Preview.

The marketing template currently lives at client/marketing inside the harp repo and is being extracted into a standalone hackutd/harp-marketing template repository. Once that lands, adopters will start from the template repo directly instead of the subdirectory.