Welcome to BeerFestDB, a stock management database and website designed, built and used by the volunteer cellar team at the Cambridge Beer Festival.
This project has been developed to provide your cellar team a full stock control system, from initial beer ordering through delivery, to recording dip figures and providing post-festival data analysis. A flexible templating system is used to generate delivery checklists, cask end signs, programme notes, and other important literature.
Any liquid refreshments can be managed using BeerFestDB (not just beer!). Separate drinks departments can be given specific user accounts with appropriate access controls.
The simplest method to get BeerFestDB up and running is to use the provided Docker container with docker-compose. There are just three steps to get started:
-
Edit beerfestdb_web.yml and db/create_dbuser_account.sql to change the default database connection password. This step is optional, but highly recommended.
-
Run these commands to build the Docker container:
docker build -t catalyst:1.0 -f Dockerfile-catalyst . docker build -t beerfestdb:1.0 . -
Run this command to initialise the database and start the application:
docker-compose up
You should now be able to navigate to http://localhost:8080/ in your web browser and log in (see below for default account details).
The default docker-compose deployment sets some environmental variables, principally in .app_env, which are useful for development but which should probably be deactivated in production. To change the default configuration in development, you can replace the beerfestdb_web_site.yml symbolic link with a file containing your desired changes. For production, the configuration can be baked in to the Docker container by changing the beerfestdb_web.yml file itself.
To run command-line scripts in the development environment, you can use commands such as this (perhaps as part of an alias) to read and write files within the project directory:
docker-compose run -w /usr/src/BeerFestDB --rm app load_data.pl -i example_data/producers.csv
Files will be created as owned by the 'nobody' user; if desired, this can be changed in the docker-compose.yml file.
This approach is suited to a more old-school environment in which Docker is not available and you simply want to install on a bare-metal LAMP stack.
- To start, you will need to install either MySQL or MariaDB. Create a new database instance, and set up the database tables by loading in db/create_dbuser_account.sql, db/create_tables.sql and db/initialise_vocabs.sql, in that order. This sets up the following default accounts:
| Username | Password |
|---|---|
| admin | admin |
| cellar | cellar |
-
Edit beerfestdb_web.yml to add the database connection details. If using a MySQL database running on localhost with the default accounts set up in the previous step, this is as simple as changing the following line:
DBI:mysql:beerfestdb:mysql:3306
to this:
DBI:mysql:beerfestdb:localhost:3306
- Run script/beerfestdb_web_server.pl to test the application. You should now be able to connect to http://localhost:3000/ and look around the website.
You can set up your production environment in a number of different ways (see the Catalyst project at http://www.catalystframework.org/ for more information on this). A typical setup might use the Apache webserver with FastCGI (via the beerfestdb_web_fastcgi.pl script). Please consult the Apache documentation for help with this configuration.
Thanks to Mark James for allowing the use of his excellent Silk icon set:
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/
Thanks also to the TargetProcess team for contributing their ExtJS 3.0 theme:
http://www.targetprocess.com/Files/TargetProcessSkin_ext_3.zip
Finally, a sincere thank you to Roger Stark, who helped design the original BeerFestDB database schema many years ago.