The Biergarten App

About

The Biergarten App is a web application designed for beer lovers to share their favorite brews and breweries with like-minded people online.

I'm using Next.js, Prisma, and CockroachDB to build this app, and I'm motivated to learn more about these technologies while exploring my passion for beer.

I've also incorporated different APIs into the application, such as the Cloudinary API for image uploading and SparkPost for email services.

To handle serverless functions (API routes), I use the next-connect package.

On the client-side, I'm using React, Tailwind CSS, and DaisyUI for styling to create a visually appealing and user-friendly interface.

I'm sharing my code publicly so that others can learn from it and use it as a reference for their own projects.

Some beer terminology

In this app you will encounter various beer related terms. Here is a list of terms used in this app and their definitions.

ABV

Alcohol by volume (abbreviated as ABV) is a standard measure of how much alcohol (ethanol) is contained in a given volume of an alcoholic beverage (expressed as a volume percent).

IBU

The International Bitterness Units scale, or IBU, is used to approximately quantify the bitterness of beer. This scale is not measured on the perceived bitterness of the beer, but rather the amount of a component of beer known as iso-alpha acids.

How to run locally

Prerequisites

Before you can run this application locally, you will need to have the following installed on your machine:

• Node.js
• npm (version 6 or higher)

You will also need to create a free account with the following services:

• Cloudinary
• SparkPost
• CockroachDB

Setup

1. Clone this repository and navigate to the project directory.

git clone https://github.com/aaronpo97/the-biergarten-app
cd the-biergarten-app

2. Run the following command to install the dependencies.

npm install

3. Run the following script to create a .env file in the root directory of the project and add the following environment variables. Update these variables with your own values.

echo "BASE_URL=

CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=
CLOUDINARY_KEY=
CLOUDINARY_SECRET=

CONFIRMATION_TOKEN_SECRET=
SESSION_SECRET=

DATABASE_URL=
NODE_ENV=

SPARKPOST_API_KEY=
SPARKPOST_SENDER_ADDRESS=" > .env

Explanation of environment variables

• BASE_URL is the base URL of the application.
  • For example, if you are running the application locally, you can set this to http://localhost:3000.
• CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME, CLOUDINARY_KEY, and CLOUDINARY_SECRET are the credentials for your Cloudinary account.
  • You can create a free account here.
• CONFIRMATION_TOKEN_SECRET is the secret used to sign the confirmation token used for email confirmation.
  • You can generate a random string using theopenssl rand -base64 127 command.
• SESSION_SECRET is the secret used to sign the session cookie.
  • Use the same command as above to generate a random string.
• DATABASE_URL is the URL of your CockroachDB database.
  • You can find this in the connection string in the CockroachDB Admin UI.
• NODE_ENV is the environment in which the application is running.
  • You can set this to development or production.
• SPARKPOST_API_KEY is the API key for your SparkPost account.
  • You can create a free account here.
• SPARKPOST_SENDER_ADDRESS is the email address that will be used to send emails.
  • This email address must be verified in your SparkPost account.

4. Initialize the database and run the migrations.

npx prisma generate
npx prisma migrate dev --name init

5. Seed the database with some initial data.

npm run seed

6. Start the application.

npm run dev

License

The Biergarten App is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. This means that anyone is free to use, modify, and distribute the code as long as they also distribute their modifications under the same license.

I encourage anyone who uses this code for educational purposes to attribute me as the original author, and to provide a link to this repository.

By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your contributions under the same license as the project.

If you have any questions or concerns about the license, please feel free to submit an issue to this repository.

I hope that this project will be useful to other developers and beer enthusiasts who are interested in learning about web development with Next.js, Prisma, CockroachDB, and other technologies.