OpenBrew

OpenBrew is a free and open source homebrew recipe workspace for building, cloning, sharing, and tracking beer recipes.

It is a modernized fork of Brewgr.com with the current work focused on keeping the app usable on a local development stack, cleaning up legacy view and route issues, and making configuration easier through environment variables.

Highlights

• Build, clone, and edit beer recipes
• Track brew sessions and recipe comments
• Upload and manage recipe photos
• Search recipes and browse style guides
• Send feedback and contact messages through the site
• Reset passwords by email when SMTP is configured
• Run locally with Docker or directly in Visual Studio/IIS Express

Recent updates

• Added Docker support for the web app and SQL Server Edge
• Moved host, database, and media path settings to environment variables
• Added SMTP configuration via environment variables for password reset and contact email
• Fixed several Mono/ASP.NET MVC view lookup issues that were breaking pages on Linux/macOS containers
• Fixed recipe photo uploads and cleanup so deleted recipes also remove their stored images and broken photo-stream links stop piling up
• Cleaned up the site footer and about navigation so source links live only on the about page
• Replaced the Facebook login flow with Sign in with Google and removed the old Facebook auth assets
• Renamed the web core project to Openbrew.Web.Core to match the rest of the refactor
• Updated the site branding from "OpenBrew recipe finder (beta)" to "Advanced Search"

Getting started

Docker

The fastest way to run OpenBrew locally is with the provided Docker setup:

docker compose up --build

By default this starts:

• web on http://localhost:8085
• db on SQL Server Edge at localhost:1433

Useful environment variables:

• OPENBREW_HOST_PORT
• OPENBREW_HOST_NAME
• OPENBREW_DB_NAME
• OPENBREW_SA_PASSWORD
• OPENBREW_REPO_ROOT
• OPENBREW_WEB_ROOT
• OPENBREW_CONNECTION_STRING
• OPENBREW_BLOG_CONNECTION_STRING
• OPENBREW_ROOT_URL
• OPENBREW_ROOT_URL_SECURE
• OPENBREW_STATIC_ROOT_URL
• OPENBREW_STATIC_ROOT_URL_SECURE
• OPENBREW_MEDIA_PHYSICAL_ROOT
• Environment
• SmtpHost
• SmtpPort
• SmtpUserName
• SmtpPassword

For local development, copy .openbrew.dev.env.example to .openbrew.dev.env. Set OPENBREW_SA_PASSWORD (required), then add SMTP and Google OAuth values as needed. scripts/run-dev.sh reads that ignored file when it creates brewgr-web; it intentionally contains no credential fallbacks. Outgoing OpenBrew messages use info@openbrew.net as the sender.

For the cluster deployment, keep using the four external Docker secrets referenced by docker-stack.dev.yml: openbrew_smtp_host, openbrew_smtp_port, openbrew_smtp_username, and openbrew_smtp_password.

If you want password reset and contact email to work, set the SMTP values to a real mail server or local mail catcher.

Swarm / Portainer

For cluster deploys, the repo now includes Swarm stack templates:

• docker-stack.dev.yml for dev.openbrew.net
• docker-stack.prod.yml for openbrew.net

Both stacks:

• run the web app from a Docker Hub image
• use mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2022-latest for SQL Server
• keep uploaded media and SQL data on persistent storage
• dev uses /var/lib/openbrew-dev
• prod keeps the current /volume1/docker/openbrew-prod path until you decide to move it too
• route through the existing traefik-net overlay network
• bootstrap the database from the schema script inside the app image

To deploy them from Portainer or docker stack deploy, provide these environment values:

• OPENBREW_IMAGE for the app image, for example austinderbique/openbrew:dev
• OPENBREW_SA_PASSWORD
• OPENBREW_DB_NAME
• OPENBREW_HOST_PORT
• OPENBREW_CONNECTION_STRING
• OPENBREW_BLOG_CONNECTION_STRING
• OPENBREW_ROOT_URL
• OPENBREW_ROOT_URL_SECURE
• OPENBREW_STATIC_ROOT_URL
• OPENBREW_STATIC_ROOT_URL_SECURE
• OPENBREW_MEDIA_PHYSICAL_ROOT
• GOOGLE_APPLICATION_KEY
• GOOGLE_APPLICATION_SECRET
• openbrew_smtp_host secret
• openbrew_smtp_port secret
• openbrew_smtp_username secret
• openbrew_smtp_password secret

The stack templates mount those four secrets into /run/secrets/... and expose them to the app through SMTP_*_FILE environment variables. The app reads those files directly, so the SMTP password never has to appear in the stack YAML or in a plain environment variable.

The workflow in .github/workflows/dockerhub.yml publishes the app image to austinderbique/openbrew using the DOCKERHUB_TOKEN repository secret. It publishes sha-<commit> for every configured branch push, latest and prod from master/main, dev from development branches, and both vX.Y.Z and X.Y.Z for a release tag.

Cluster migration checklist

Keep real credentials in your cluster's secret store (or a Portainer/Docker secret), not in either stack YAML file. The stack templates deliberately reference GOOGLE_APPLICATION_KEY and GOOGLE_APPLICATION_SECRET; GOOGLE_APPLICATION_KEY is the Google OAuth client ID.

Recipe photos are both written to and served from the application Media directory. Mount the same persistent volume at this exact in-container path:

/workspace/brewgr/Openbrew.Web/Media

Set OPENBREW_MEDIA_PHYSICAL_ROOT to that same path. Mounting the volume only at a separate path such as /data/media lets uploads report success but leaves /Media/... image URLs unreachable after a refresh.

For Google Sign in, configure these authorized JavaScript origins on the OAuth web client as applicable:

http://localhost:8085
https://dev.openbrew.net
https://openbrew.net

The retained OAuth callback endpoints are https://dev.openbrew.net/Auth/OAuthLogin and https://openbrew.net/Auth/OAuthLogin. The current Google Identity Services button posts its credential to the same-origin /Auth/GoogleLogin endpoint; that URL is not an OAuth redirect URI.

Before increasing web replicas, ensure every replica can reach the same media volume and that your session/authentication setup is appropriate for more than one instance. The provided Swarm templates intentionally pin the web service to one node.

Visual Studio / IIS Express

1. Clone the repository.
2. Restore packages.
3. Set OPENBREW_CONNECTION_STRING to a valid SQL Server connection string.
4. Make sure dev.openbrew.local points to 127.0.0.1 if you are using the host name based dev setup.
5. Open Openbrew.Web.sln and run the web project.

Database setup

If you are starting from scratch, follow the database instructions in:

• Setup/Database/README.md

Source and credit

• Current source: https://github.com/aderbique/openbrew
• Original source: https://github.com/rak-phillip/Brewgr.com

Technologies

• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC
• Microsoft Entity Framework
• AutoMapper
• Ninject
• Exceptional
• Fluent Validation
• Image Resizer
• jQuery
• Various jQuery plugins

License

OpenBrew is copyright (c) 2011-2015 Matthew Marksbury, Jason Zimmerman, and other contributors under the GNU General Public License v3.0.