The NHS lists numerous dental practises through the Find a Dentist service, and its underlying data is available through the NHS' Service Search API (organisations (version 2)).
The Find a Dentist service serves a flat list of results. Dentists on a map aims to present the same data in a friendlier format for end users, as well as adding search, filtering & notification capabilities.
This project relies on third-party services:
- Geonames Web Services for autocompletion of place names
- NHS APIs for the underlying list of Dental services
- Cloudflare for the storage of user data to send notifications (using Cloudflare KV)
- Sendgrid to send email alerts to users who've signed up for them
- Fathom (optional) for privacy-conscious web analytics
Configure .env.local with credentials for these providers. .env.example has been provided as a template for expected settings.
| Environmental variable | Note |
|---|---|
| NHSDIGITAL_ODATA_ENDPOINT | Preset to https://api.nhs in .env.uk/ |
| NHSDIGITAL_ODATA_SUBSCRIPTION_KEY | Your subscription key for the NHS API. You can retrieve this from your My Account page |
| NEXT_PUBLIC_GEONAMES_USERNAME | Your username for the Geonames Web Services |
| CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN | Your credentials for the Cloudflare API. Needs read and edit access to "Workers KV Storage" |
| CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID | The ID of the Cloudflare account under which the Cloudflare KV namespace is set up |
| CLOUDFLARE_KV_NAMESPACE | The ID for the Cloudflare KV namespace under which notification data will be saved |
| SENDGRID_API_KEY | The API Key for Sendgrid, to send email alerts for new dentists |
| EMAIL_FROM_NAME | What name any e-mails we send should come from |
| EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS | What address any e-mails we send should come from |
| MAX_DENTISTS | Development setting to limit how many dentists are loaded on screen at any one time. |
| CRON_API_KEY | Shared secret to authorise a scheduling system to prod API routes for cron jobs. |
| NEXT_PUBLIC_FALLBACK_SITE_URL | The public site URL to fall back upon if we cannot automatically derive the current site URL (e.g. in Github Actions) |
| NEXT_PUBLIC_FATHOM_CUSTOM_DOMAIN | Analytics via Fathom |
| NEXT_PUBLIC_FATHOM_TRACKING_CODE | Analytics via Fathom |
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.
The list of dentists, and whether they are currently accepting patients, is managed offline and committed into the repository nightly from the refresh-data Github Action.
You can manually update this data locally with:
npm run refresh-data