BeerFestDB

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 cellar teams with 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.

Design Philosophy

Since BeerFestDB has evolved as part of an ongoing series of festivals, it has been used at several different levels of complexity over the years. Festivals can choose how much of the database functionality they need. Supported use-cases in order of increasing complexity:

• Basic festival product management: record which beers and breweries were represented at each festival.
• Sales pricing, bar signage (cask-end signs, bar menus); allergen and vegan-suited product tracking.
• On-site cask management, including dips and sales reporting.
• Beer ordering and delivery tracking, automated order generation.

Our older, smaller festivals typically only recorded beers and prices; later, we started tracking daily sales via cask dips; finally we included beer ordering as part of the cellar process included in the database. We've retained support for all these ways of using the database, so that smaller festivals can start at a simpler level and then choose to use advanced features as they grow larger.

Features

• Highly configurable, product-agnostic stock control website with relational database backend
• Comprehensive process documentation tested across multiple live festivals
• Tools dashboard writen using streamlit for rapid development of new data visualisations
• JSON-based API allowing programmatic access
• R package facilitating festival data download via API
• Mobile app for live recording of common cellaring tasks
• Support for deployment via containerisation

Deployment using Docker Images

This is the simplest way to get the system up and running. See the deployment README for details on how to run BeerFestDB from a set of docker images using either Docker Compose or Kubernetes.

Installation (without Docker/K8S)

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.

1. 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

2. Copy the beerfestdb_web_site.yml template to beerfestdb_web.yml and edit it 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:MariaDB:database=beerfestdb;host=mysql;port=3306
   

to this:

    DBI:MariaDB:database=beerfestdb;host=localhost;port=3306

3. 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.

To set up the additional tools dashboard, please see the dashboard README file for instructions.

Mobile App

The BeerFestMobile app will allow a cellar team to edit cask data (dips, vented/tapped/ready, notes etc.) directly in the database as they work on their stillages. This can save significant admin time between sessions.

Credits

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.