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Vigil 🕯️ 守夜

Can't sleep at 3 AM? Open it, light a candle, leave one line if you want. On a world map showing Earth's night side, see how many candles are still burning right now — and where — a few strangers awake with you.

🔗 Live: https://vigil-cc881.web.app

How to use

Web

Just open https://vigil-cc881.web.app in any browser. No sign-up, no install — you're signed in anonymously the moment it loads.

iOS (Add to Home Screen)

1. Open https://vigil-cc881.web.app in Safari
2. Tap the Share button ↑ → choose Add to Home Screen
3. Tap Add — a Vigil icon appears on your home screen and works like an app

What is this

It's late, you're awake, and it's quiet. You open Vigil and light a candle. It burns for 30 minutes on a dark world map, somewhere over your timezone. Next to it you might leave a single short line. Across the map, other candles are lit — Tokyo, London, a city you've never been to — some with a line drifting beside them, most just glowing.

No chat. No profiles. No replies. Just: you're not the only one awake.

Vigil is built on one idea: the smallest unit of company is knowing someone is there. One line is the ceiling; a conversation would be an intrusion.

The rules (non-negotiable)

• One tap lights a candle; it burns 30 minutes, then goes out on its own. While burning it can't be snuffed early or extended. After it's out you may light a fresh one — a new 30 minutes, a new line. Keeping vigil all night is allowed, but every candle lives and dies in full
• One candle per person at a time. The document ID is your anonymous uid — the structure guarantees it
• You may leave one line (optional, 40 characters max, plain text). It lives and dies with the candle: when the flame goes out the words are gone. No history, no editing, no replies. URLs are never parsed or linkified
• Location is timezone-city only — derived from your browser's Intl timezone (e.g. Asia/Taipei). Zero GPS, zero IP lookup, zero permission prompt. We don't know where you are; we only know which timezone your late night belongs to
• No account (anonymous auth, invisible to you), no name, no history, no reply mechanism
• Candles only appear on the night side. The map draws the day/night terminator live from pure solar-position math; your flame sits over the dark half of the Earth

The map

A single screen: the night-side world map, the candles, one "light" button with an optional one-line input, and a line that reads "N candles are burning right now."

• Pan, zoom, and wrap. Drag to pan (the world wraps seamlessly east–west), scroll or pinch to zoom in. On a phone it opens centered on your own timezone, filling the screen
• Hover or tap a candle and its city and time remaining surface softly — "Tokyo · 12 minutes left" — with the line beside it, if there is one
• Your own candle carries a faint marker and a burn-down animation; when it's spent, the button returns to "light another"
• Quiet by design. Deep-night palette, slow animations, no sound. Candles breathe gently, fade in when lit, and dim as they burn out. As your timezone nears sunrise, a faint warm glow rises from the horizon — the night really does end

Same-timezone candles are scattered by a small random offset (~0.3°) so they don't stack on one pixel; zooming in separates them further.

Honesty as infrastructure

The product's promises are enforced by Firestore Security Rules, not by good intentions:

• A candle burns exactly 30 minutes — expiresAt == litAt + 30min is enforced precisely; it can't be extended
• No overwriting a burning candle — a relight is only allowed once the previous one has expired (resource.data.expiresAt <= request.time)
• Deletion is impossible (allow delete: if false) — you cannot snuff a candle early; expiry is the only way out
• Field-level validation — timezone must be a valid IANA string, the message must be a string ≤ 40 characters, the scatter offset is bounded
• Reads are open to everyone; expired documents are swept by Firestore TTL

All of it is covered by the emulator test suite (npm run test:rules).

Tech

• Vite + React + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS v4
• Firebase: anonymous auth (invisible sign-in), Firestore (realtime sync via onSnapshot), Hosting — no custom backend at all
• The map is hand-built, no map library: an inline SVG world outline (from world-atlas 110m TopoJSON), a timezone→coordinate table generated from IANA zone1970.tab, and a custom pan/zoom/wrap camera
• The day/night terminator is pure solar-position math — no external dependency

Local development

npm install

# Real Firebase project (uses .env.local)
npm run dev

# Full stack against local emulators
npm run emulators          # Auth :9099 + Firestore :8080
npm run dev:emu

# Security Rules test suite (spins up the Firestore emulator; needs Java)
npm run test:rules

To run against a real Firebase project, copy .env.example to .env.local and fill in your web app config.

Deliberately not building

Chat, replies, accounts, nicknames, history, streaks, notifications, precise location, sound effects, and any engagement optimization.

When candles are few, we don't fake them — "only you tonight" is also true. The honesty of solitude matters more than the lie of a crowd.