Live Polling

A realtime poll app for meetups. Hosts can open a slider or multiple-choice poll from /admin, attendees vote anonymously, and everyone sees live aggregates plus a history of closed polls.

Setup

Create .env.local with your values:

ADMIN_KEY=your-long-random-string
KV_REST_API_URL=your-vercel-kv-url
KV_REST_API_TOKEN=your-vercel-kv-token

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run locally

npm run dev

Visit:

• Attendee view: http://localhost:3000/
• Admin view: http://localhost:3000/admin?key=YOUR_ADMIN_KEY
• Projector results: http://localhost:3000/results

Prewritten poll presets

Create or edit data/prewritten-polls.json to define polls ahead of time. The admin page loads these presets in a sidebar; click a preset to populate the form before opening a poll.

Example:

[
  {
    "id": "energy-check",
    "type": "slider",
    "question": "How energized is the room right now?"
  },
  {
    "id": "next-topic",
    "type": "multiple_choice",
    "question": "Which topic should we cover next?",
    "options": ["APIs", "Testing", "Infra"]
  }
]

Aggregation test

npm run test:agg

Unit tests

npm test

Manual validation (end-to-end)

1. Start the dev server:

npm run dev

2. Open the admin page:

http://localhost:3000/admin?key=YOUR_ADMIN_KEY

3. Open attendee pages in multiple tabs:

http://localhost:3000/

4. Open a poll from the admin console (try both slider and multiple choice).

5. For slider polls, move sliders in each attendee tab and confirm:

• the count increases to the number of distinct anon IDs
• the average changes as expected
• the histogram bars update

6. For multiple-choice polls, select options in each attendee tab and confirm:

• the count increases to the number of distinct anon IDs
• the option counts change as expected

7. Close the poll and confirm:

• attendee pages show “Waiting for the next poll”
• the closed poll summary appears in history

8. Use “Clear all polls” to remove the active poll and history.

9. Open a new poll and confirm voting resets for the new poll.

Expected example: If two attendees set values to 0 and 10, count is 2, avg is 5.0, histogram[0]=1 and histogram[10]=1. If two attendees pick option A and one picks option B, counts are A=2 and B=1.

Vercel deployment notes

• Set ADMIN_KEY, KV_REST_API_URL, and KV_REST_API_TOKEN in the Vercel project environment variables.
• The app uses @vercel/kv for persistence; no filesystem writes are used for poll state.
• Admin routes validate ADMIN_KEY server-side before opening or closing a poll.