Expiration date manager

The easy, intuitive and efficient way to manage a shared food inventory - WIP

A deployment of an older version (before EventSourcing and the navigation overhaul; but supports 2FA) can be found at https://exdateman.herokuapp.com; and the current version may be up at https://exdateman-dev.herokuapp.com.

Development happens on the EventSourcing branch of this repository.

Contents

• Expiration date manager
  • Contents
  • Description
  • Features
  • Technologies used
  • Environment variables
    • SSL
    • Database connectivity
    • JSON Web Tokens
  • Usage
  • License

Description

ExDateMan (short for "Expiration date manager") is a offline-capable, installable PWA.

It's goal is to provide a simple and intuitive way for people to manage their shared food inventories, allowing them to give read or write access to their inventories.

The items in such an inventory are referred to as "Things", of which each inventory can have multiple. However, they themselves don't actually represent the presence of them in the inventory. Instead, "Stocks" represent the individual instances of the Things in an inventory. They each have an expiration date and get removed from the inventory, after they are removed from the physical inventory.

Designed to be deployed in a cloud-native environment, it uses a Postgres database to store its data in an event-sourced fashion, meaning it simply stores events, and only derives the current state form that. This allows one to retroactively view the state of the data from some time ago. This is often also referred to as CQS.

A Docker image will be available in the future.

Features

• Offline capable
• PWA compliant
• Synchronization
• Sort by category
• Multi-user capable
• Rights management
• Two factor authentication
• Event sourced data store (CQS)
• Access management per inventory
• Support for occasionally connected devices
• Every physical item has its expression date stored
• A barcode reader to speed up reading in the physical inventory

Technologies used

The application consists of a Frontend and a Backend.

The frontend is a SPA implemented in Angular, using the Angular Material UI library. The backend is implemented in TypeScript and runs on Node.js. All data is persisted in Postgres as Events, with one single table. The JSON of each event is stored in the binary JSON format BSON.

Environment variables

The host-specific configuration is done in environment variables.

The port can be specified using the PORT environment variable, and the non-SSL port can be specified using the INSECURE_PORT environment variable. They default to 443 and 80 respectively, except when EDM_SSL is not set to yes, then it will be 80.

SSL

SSL is optional and can be provided directly by this application. However, it needs to be configured:

Variable	Meaning
EDM_SSL	If SSL should be used
EDM_SSL_PK	The path to the SSL private key file
EDM_SSL_CERT	The path to the SSL certificate file
EDM_SSL_CA	The path to the SSL certificate authority chain file

Database connectivity

Connecting to the database requires some configuration:

Variable	Meaning
EDM_DB_HOST	The host name of the database
EDM_DB_DB	The name of the database
EDM_DB_USER	The username used to connect to the database
EDM_DB_PORT	The port used to connect to the database
EDM_DB_PWD	The password used to connect to the database
EDM_DB_SSL	If SSL should be used to connect to the database
EDM_DB_SCHEMA	The name of the schema in which to store the data

JSON Web Tokens

Variable	Meaning
EDM_JWT_PRIVATE_KEY	The path to the private key used to sign JWTs
EDM_JWT_PUBLIC_KEY	The path to the public key used to verify the JWTs

Usage

1. Set all environment variables as specified above
2. Install Postgres and Node.js on your server
3. Clone the repo
4. cd into the frontend directory
5. Run npm install && npm run build
6. cd into the backend directory
7. Run npm install && npm start

License

Licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3 license.

Copyright (c) 2018-2019 Bernd-L. All rights reserved.