Simple Wine Cellar

Wine cellar inventory with QR codes in a simple web app.

Getting started

This hacky, homely little project was written just for personal use in my cellar. That's why I beautified and productionized it into Cellar Project, which has a nicer interface, supports infinite users, and sends you QR codes in the mail.

Cellar Project is still closed-source, but this repo contains code for its predecessor, which is shown in the GIF above. I originally posted this project here on r/wine.

If you want to use this CRUDdy old web app - haha, get it? - you'll need to do the following.

Deploy the backend

Create an AWS account if you don't have one. Create a Cognito user pool. Add a user in the console. Change the password by uncommenting the newPasswordRequired lines in webapp/js/baileys-cellar-webapp.js. Create a DynamoDB table with an index for bottle numbers. Add the table and index names at the top of backend/web_lambda.js. Create an API Gateway API with a single POST endpoint called crud. Point it at a Lambda that contains backend/web_lambda.js.

Host the frontend

Upload the contents of webapp to a static web hosting service like AWS S3.

Print QR codes

Buy some sticker sheets. The sticker in the video is 1.5" in diameter, which I thought was a perfect size. Get a ruler and make measurements like those in qr/requirements.txt. Pass them as console args to qr/generate_qr_sheets.py and print the resulting images onto your sticker sheets.

Populate your database

Get a printed sticker and put it on your bottle. Scan the label to open the web app - the default camera app in iOS can do it. Fill in the add form.

Drinkability classification

When an entry doesn't have a lower and upper drink-by year, I consider it

• "mature" up to three years after vintage
• "drink soon" between three and five years
• "past prime" after five.

A wine with a lower and upper year is considered

• "undrinkable" (even though that's not really true) between vintage and the lower year
• "young" until 25% of the way between lower and upper
• "mature" between 25% and 75%
• "drink soon" between 75% and 100%
• "past prime" after that.

Limitations

For end users

1. Credentials aren't cached on the frontend, so you have to login every time you refresh. You also have to play with code every time you add a user - by uncommenting and recommenting newPasswordRequired - which is a pain.
2. QR codes encode passwords in plain-text. That's obviously horrible, but then I wrote this for exactly two users 😅. That means that if your friends want to be giant assholes, they can log into your account and wreak havoc after you open a bottle with them. Not that, uh, my friends are giant assholes...
3. The cellar database isn't backed up programmatically.

For developers

1. There is no programmatic deployment, so you have to copy-paste the lambda's contents and drag-drop the frontend code into S3. Ideally the lambda would be deployed with Serverless and the frontend would be deployed with a simple script containing an AWS CLI command.
2. The code isn't minified or otherwise obfuscated before deployment.
3. The code that generates the table in webapp/js/baileys-cellar-webapp.js is super hacky. JQuery or something else should be used instead of whatever I did 🙃
4. PWA support is incomplete because there's no service worker.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.