social-services-il

An open platform for Israel's social services: a public site built for someone in distress on a phone, an admin for ingesting services from many kinds of source, a documented read/write API, and an MCP server so AI agents can query the same data.

Israel already has a national map of social services at kolsherut.org.il, operated by כל זכות. It holds about 15,000 services across two taxonomy axes. This project is a separate, independent implementation over the same public data model, aimed at three gaps: there is no programmatic way to submit or update a service, no documented public API or agent interface, and the search experience requires understanding the taxonomy before it can answer a question.

See docs/existing-system.md for the full research notes on that system — its data model, ranking rules and API — and what this project keeps, changes and adds.

Status

In progress, deployed at social-services-il-zomerg.xhostd.app.

Working: the schema, the openeligibility taxonomy, Hebrew search, and the public read API — search with facets, distance ranking and collapsing, card detail, taxonomy, autocomplete, stats and bulk export. node scripts/smoke.mjs <url> exercises all of it end to end.

Next: the public site, the MCP server, the admin, and the write API.

Related MCP server: Data.gov.il MCP Server

Stack

TypeScript end to end. Express and Postgres (with PostGIS) on the server, React with Vite for the public site and the admin. Deployed on xhostd.

packages/
  core/     shared types, Hebrew normalisation, card identity, ranking
  db/       migrations and query helpers
  ingest/   source connectors, scheduler, importers
  api/      Express: public API, admin API, ingest API, MCP; serves both SPAs
  web/      the public site
  admin/    the admin interface
docs/

Development

npm install
npm run build
DATABASE_URL=postgres://... node packages/db/dist/migrate.js
PORT=3000 node packages/api/dist/server.js

Without DATABASE_URL the server still starts and /api/health reports the database as not-configured, which is useful for front-end work.

Deployment

install.sh runs at build time as root: installs dependencies, builds every package, then prunes dev dependencies out of the image. launch.sh runs at boot as a non-root user: applies migrations, then execs the server so it becomes PID 1 and receives shutdown signals directly.

Migrations run at boot rather than at build because DATABASE_URL only exists at runtime. They are idempotent and guarded by a Postgres advisory lock, so a rolling deploy cannot run them twice.

Data and licensing

The service data this platform is designed to hold is public information published by nonprofits, government ministries and local authorities. The taxonomy derives from openeligibility, itself a fork of the US Open Eligibility Project.

This code is MIT licensed. The data it serves carries its own terms from each upstream source, recorded per record.