About

AntAlmanac is a course-planning platform for courses at UC Irvine. It includes two powerful planning tools: AntAlmanac Scheduler, for quarterly schedules, and AntAlmanac Planner, for multi-year roadmaps and course discovery. Features include:

AntAlmanac Scheduler	AntAlmanac Planner
Search for classes by department, section code, and keywords.	Show requirements for multiple majors and minors
Preview class times on the integrated calendar.	View completion of your major, specialization, minor, and GE requirements
Quickly access course statistics, reviews, and prerequisites.	Import your unofficial transcript via StudentAccess to populate previous courses.
Locate your class locations on the interactive map.	Add credits from any transferred courses, AP exams, and GE/Elective credits

Technology

Our website is a Next.js application deployed on AWS using SST (Serverless Stack). A summary of the libraries we use are listed below.

Frontend

• Shared
  • React - Library to build dynamic, component-based UIs.
  • Next.js - React framework with server-side rendering.
  • Material UI (MUI) - React component library that implements Google's Material Design.
• Scheduler
  • Zustand - State management.
• Planner
  • Redux - State management.

Backend

• tRPC - type-safe API access layer for the AntAlmanac API.
• Anteater API - API maintained by ICSSC for retrieving UCI data.
• Drizzle ORM - high-performance type-safe SQL-like access layer compatible with all major SQL dialects.
• PostgreSQL - Relational database for storing user data and schedules.

Tooling

• Shared
  • SST - Infrastructure as code framework for AWS deployment.
  • TypeScript - JavaScript with type-checking.
• Scheduler
  • Docker - Containerization for local database development.
  • Vitest - Test runner.

Repository Structure

This is a pnpm monorepo:

antalmanac
├── apps
│    ├── aants/ - the class notification service (AWS Lambda + SQS + SES) for enrollment status changes.
│    ├── antalmanac/ - the main Next.js app, unifying AntAlmanac Scheduler and AntAlmanac Planner.
│    ├── antalmanac-planner/ - AntAlmanac Planner frontend and backend.
│    ├── antalmanac-scheduler - AntAlmanac Scheduler frontend and backend.
│    │   ├── db/ - Drizzle schema, migrations, and the database client.
│    │   └── types/ - shared internal TypeScript types.
│    └── ios/ - the native iOS wrapper (Swift WebView + push notifications).
└── packages
     └── anteater-api/ - Anteater API types, client, and utilities.

History

AntAlmanac (now AntAlmanac Scheduler) was created in 2018 by a small group of students under the leadership of @the-rango. They formed an AntAlmanac club for ongoing development and, in 2019, @devsdevsdevs directed a massive rewrite of the codebase as project lead.

In 2020, AntAlmanac was adopted by the ICSSC Projects Committee. Meanwhile, PeterPortal (now AntAlmanac Planner) was created by another team on the Projects Committee led by @uci-mars, aiming to unify fragmented course information and long-term planning resources in one application.

In February 2026, AntAlmanac and PeterPortal unified into a single course-planning platform at antalmanac.com. This repository now powers both tools. The legacy PeterPortal repository is available as a public archive. Read more in the merge announcement.

ICSSC continues to provide funding, marketing, and engineering to support the growing number of users and open-source developers that make up our AntAlmanac Community.

Since then, the project has continued to evolve and grow with successive generations of projects committee members!

Deployment

AntAlmanac is deployed to AWS using SST (Serverless Stack). The deployment process is automated and managed through the sst.config.ts file.

Deployment Environments

• Production: Deployed to antalmanac.com (with a www.antalmanac.com alias)
• Staging: Each pull request gets a preview deploy at staging-{PR_NUMBER}.antalmanac.com
• Shared staging: staging-shared.antalmanac.com is a persistent environment for cross-team (Scheduler ⇄ Planner) integration testing; deployed manually

Environment Variables

The variables below configure a full production/staging deployment and are set in your AWS environment or CI/CD pipeline. For local development you only need the variables in apps/antalmanac/.env.example and apps/antalmanac-scheduler/db/.env.example; anything tagged (optional locally) - maps, analytics, and the Planner integration - can be left unset when running locally.

• Shared
  • OIDC_ISSUER_URL - OAuth issuer URL
  • ANTEATER_API_KEY - API key for Anteater API
  • PLANNER_CLIENT_API_KEY (optional locally) - API key for the AntAlmanac Planner integration
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY (optional locally) - PostHog project key for product analytics
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_HOST (optional locally) - PostHog host for product analytics
• Scheduler
  • DB_URL - Database connection string
  • MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN (optional locally) - Mapbox API token for map features
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_TILES_ENDPOINT (optional locally) - Endpoint for map tiles
  • OIDC_CLIENT_ID - OAuth client ID for Google authentication
  • BETTER_AUTH_URL - URL used for OAuth (automatically set based on stage)
  • BETTER_AUTH_SECRET - OAuth secret key, you can generate one here
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL - Base URL of the site (automatically set based on stage)
• Planner
  • PUBLIC_API_URL - Anteater API URL
  • PRODUCTION_DOMAIN - Domain for current deployment
  • PLANNER_OIDC_CLIENT_ID - OAuth client ID for Google authentication
  • PLANNER_DATABASE_URL (optional locally) - Database connection string
  • ADMIN_EMAILS (optional locally) - List of emails with access to administrative actions
  • PLANNER_SESSION_SECRET (optional locally) - Secret key for session management

If you need access to development credentials, please contact a project lead in our Discord.

⚠️ Note: Anteater API requires a special API key in order for search functionality to work. If you'd like to work on a feature relating to this, please send a message in our Discord.

Where Does the Data Come From?

We consolidate our data directly from official UCI sources such as: UCI Catalogue, UCI Public Records Office, and UCI WebReg (courtesy of Anteater API).

Disclaimer

Although we consolidate our data directly from official UCI sources, this application is by no means an official UCI tool. We strive to keep our data as accurate as possible with the limited support we receive from UCI. Please take this into consideration while using the website.

Terms & Conditions

There are no hard policies at the moment for utilizing this tool. However, please refrain from abusing the website by methods such as: sending excessive amount of requests in a small period of time or purposely looking to exploit the system.