Shabbat Helper

A small, focused iOS app that shows upcoming Shabbat candle-lighting and Havdalah times for your current location and any cities you save. Times, the weekly Torah portion (parsha), and the Hebrew date are fetched from the Hebcal API and presented in a clean, weather-style interface.

Features

• Current location – automatically detects where you are and shows this week's (or next week's, once Shabbat has passed) candle-lighting time.
• Favorite cities – search for and save any city in the world; reorder or delete them inline.
• Shabbat details – candle lighting, Havdalah, the weekly parsha, the Hebrew date, and coordinates for each location.
• 12h / 24h time – toggle between AM/PM and 24-hour formats.
• Fully localized – English, Hebrew (with RTL support), Russian, French, and Amharic.
• Pull to refresh and graceful handling of offline / location-permission states.

Home	Saved cities	Details	City search

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI with an MVVM architecture
• CoreLocation for current-location lookup and MapKit for city search/geocoding
• Hebcal Shabbat API for candle-lighting / Havdalah / parsha data
• UserDefaults for persisting saved locations and preferences
• XCTest for unit and UI tests

Project Structure

App source lives under shabbat-helper/ and is organized by responsibility:

shabbat-helper/
├── Models/        # Hebcal API response types, SavedLocation
├── Services/      # Hebcal API, location, geocoding, persistence, language mapping
├── ViewModels/    # Observable state and presentation logic
├── Views/         # SwiftUI screens, overlays, and formatting helpers
├── Assets.xcassets
└── *.lproj/       # Localizations: en, he, ru, fr, am

Tests live in shabbat-helperTests/ (unit) and shabbat-helperUITests/ (UI automation).

Requirements

• Xcode 26 or newer
• iOS 26.5+ deployment target
• Swift 5

Getting Started

Open the project in Xcode and run:

open shabbat-helper.xcodeproj

Then build and run with ⌘R (choose a simulator or a device).

From the command line:

# Build
xcodebuild -project shabbat-helper.xcodeproj -scheme shabbat-helper build

# Test
xcodebuild -project shabbat-helper.xcodeproj -scheme shabbat-helper test

The app requests location access (When In Use) to show candle-lighting times for where you are. You can also use the app entirely with manually-added favorite cities.

License

This project is for personal use. Shabbat times are provided by Hebcal; please review their terms of use.