Barkeep

barkeep is a home bartending application that tracks your liquor cabinet and recommends cocktail recipes for you.

You can view the running application at barkeep.website.

I am blogging about my work on this app here: https://edbrown23.github.io/blog/

Development setup

Barkeep uses Ruby 3.2.2, Node.js 24 LTS, and PostgreSQL 14 with the pgvector extension. Volta reads the Node version from package.json. Copy the sample database settings, adjust them for your local PostgreSQL user, and install the dependencies:

cp .env.example .env
bin/setup

For local development, run the Homebrew PostgreSQL 14 service on port 5433. This project intentionally avoids the standard PostgreSQL port (5432) so it does not conflict with another local database setup. Set port = 5433 in the Homebrew cluster's postgresql.conf (typically $(brew --prefix)/var/postgresql@14/postgresql.conf), set DB_USER in .env to your local PostgreSQL role, then restart the service before running the setup commands above:

brew services restart postgresql@14

The database user must be able to create the barkeep_development and barkeep_test databases. PostgreSQL must provide the vector extension used by the application schema.

Run the same database preparation and test commands used by CI with:

RAILS_ENV=test bin/rails db:test:prepare
RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rspec

Check Rails autoloading after dependency or application structure changes:

RAILS_ENV=test bin/rails zeitwerk:check

Build the browser assets with:

npm run build
npm run build:css

Browser regression tests

The system specs use an isolated headless Chrome profile and the test database. Build assets first, and provide a ChromeDriver matching your installed Chrome. The driver is discovered from CHROMEDRIVER (an executable path), CHROMEWEBDRIVER (a directory, as provided by GitHub Actions), or PATH. The direct Capybara registration supports the Selenium version currently in the lockfile.

npm run build
npm run build:css
CHROMEDRIVER=/path/to/chromedriver bundle exec rspec spec/system

The full bundle exec rspec run includes these browser specs. If local precompiled files in public/assets are stale, move that generated directory aside before testing so Rails serves the current builds. Failure screenshots are saved under tmp/capybara.