TYPOGRAPHY, taken from the lockup and walked down to something you can read a paragraph in. "The Vine" in LeJour Script over COFFEEHOUSE + BAKERY in AdBhashitha is the whole brand voice, so: the script stays in the wordmark and nowhere else (it is unreadable at length); AdBhashitha carries h1–h4 and the price, and keeps the wordmark's 0.01em letter-spacing so a heading sits on the same rhythm as the logo above it; `eyebrow` and `label` are the hinge — sans, but letterspaced like the tagline — and then plain Raleway. Sizes are declared once in type.css instead of being re-chosen per template, and none of the type classes set a colour, because the same heading appears in sage on cream and in cream on sage. BUTTONS AND SURFACES have names now. `panel` is the white box that was "bg-white rounded-3xl shadow-xs" written out in nine places (which is how two of them end up with different corners); `panel-lift` is one that reacts. `pill` is one shape in four colourways, which exist because this site puts buttons on cream AND on sage and they cannot be the same colour on both. `chip`/`chip-on` are the products filter. RHYTHM: `section` (py-16 md:py-24) and `band` (py-14 md:py-20, tighter because a coloured strip is already doing the separating) replace nine hand-picked paddings. FOCUS: one visible ring for everything reachable by keyboard, as an outline rather than a shadow so it works on cream, on white and on the sage bands, at zero specificity so a utility can still win. Z-INDEX: written down in base.css, all two of it — 40 the sticky header, 30 the mobile panel, which is a child of the header and so can only ever sit under the bar. Everything else stacks in document order. The point of the comment is that a third layer doesn't get invented at 9999. DROPDOWNS: the admin's category selects were drawing the platform's own arrow in the platform's grey; they get the site's chevron and room for it. 53 tests green. Every class used across all nine pages — five public, four admin — resolves in the compiled stylesheet, so nothing here is styled by a name that doesn't exist. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The Vine Coffeehouse + Bakery — itsthevine.com
Site for The Vine, 215 E Main Street, Princeville, Illinois. Spring Boot rendering its own pages with Thymeleaf, on the Bennett platform.
Previously a Next.js app on Cloudflare, then a React SPA on Spring, now server-rendered end to end — there is no JavaScript framework in this repo. The look has not changed through any of it.
Shape
| Backend | Spring Boot 4 / Java 25, com.itsthevine.web |
| Pages | Thymeleaf, src/main/resources/templates — no JavaScript except one 100-line file for the product-card arrows |
| Styling | Tailwind v4, compiled from the templates by the Tailwind CLI into static/css/site.css. src/main/styles is the whole asset pipeline |
| Admin | Thymeleaf forms at /admin, behind Authentik |
| Database | Postgres (itsthevine on the shared app-db cluster), Flyway |
| Photos | public MinIO bucket itsthevine — not in the repo or the image |
| Deploy | Gitea CI → image → Watchtower → Caddy |
The look, in one place
src/main/styles is the whole of it — no bundler, no framework, one stylesheet:
| file | what it holds |
|---|---|
theme.css |
the three typefaces and the sage-and-cream palette. Names, nothing drawn |
base.css |
bare elements: page background, body type, the fade-in, the focus ring, the z-index scale |
type.css |
the typographic ladder (below) |
components.css |
panel, pill-*, chip, section/band — the site's own classes |
admin.css |
the admin's controls, as @utility so file: variants work on the photo pickers |
The type ladder comes out of the logo. The lockup is "The Vine" in LeJour Script over COFFEEHOUSE +
BAKERY in AdBhashitha, letterspaced — and everything below is that idea made progressively more readable:
the script stays in the wordmark and nowhere else; AdBhashitha carries h1–h4 and price, keeping the
wordmark's 0.01em letter-spacing so a heading sits on the same rhythm as the logo above it; eyebrow and
label are the hinge, sans but letterspaced like the tagline; then plain Raleway for anything you have to
read a paragraph of. None of the type classes set a colour — the same heading appears in sage on cream and
cream on sage.
Write those class names in templates rather than the utilities behind them: a button is pill-sage, and
the four colourways exist because the site puts buttons on cream and on sage.
Why server-rendered
The pages are content: a menu, a story, opening hours, a price list. Rendering them in the browser meant
shipping a router and a component tree to show them, and it meant PageMetaController — a class whose
only job was to splice per-page <title> and OG tags into one shell with regular expressions, because a
crawler or a link-preview scraper got nothing useful otherwise. A page that is rendered on the server
writes its own head, so that whole mechanism is deleted rather than ported. The category filter is a
?category= link instead of a click handler, which also makes every filtered view a URL you can send
someone, and the contact form is a form post.
platform.web.spa.enabled=false follows from that: the platform's fallback forwards extension-less paths
to /index.html so a React SPA can own routing, and there is no SPA here — leaving it on would answer a
mistyped URL with a blank page and a 200 instead of the site's own 404.
What the server owns
Everything. The pages arrive complete.
/api/products,/api/categories— the catalogue, its curated order, the category filter and the absolute image URLs. This was a TypeScript array shipped to every visitor; it's now a table (V2__products.sql) read throughProductCatalog./catering— the goodie box and catering page. Each table is rendered twice from the same model and CSS shows one: a real<table>on a wide screen, because that is what a price list is and a screen reader then announces the size and the item together; stacked cards on a phone, because a four-column price table there is either illegible or a sideways scroll, and this page is mostly read on phones./api/catering— the same tables as JSON: the columns, the prices already written the way they should be read, the entries under each column, and the small print. These came from the bakery as a spreadsheet and are stored as one (V4__catering.sql, read throughCateringMenu) rather than as markup, because the prices move and the last line of that spreadsheet says the tables are "mostly just an idea for people".Moneyis the only thing that decides what a typed price means or how it prints. A table with no columns or no lines is left off the public response — adding a table and filling it in are two separate acts in the admin, and the gap between them shouldn't put a bare heading on the live page./contact— the form posts here and gets a page back. It renders rather than redirects on failure, so a refused relay comes back with what the visitor typed still in the boxes: they wrote it once, and the failure is ours./api/contactstill exists and answers JSON; both go throughEnquiries, so there is one order of operations for taking an enquiry./api/contact— validates, records the enquiry, emails it, then fans out to the n8n hub. Recorded before sending on purpose: a relay outage costs a notification, not the enquiry. Undelivered ones areenquiry.delivered = false. Validation and delivery come fromplatform-starter-contact, shared with the other sites.- Per-page metadata — each route states its own title and description in
SiteController, next to the handler that serves it, andfragments/head.htmllays them out.SiteControllerTestasserts the real<title>of every page.
/admin
Forms and redirects. Every write is a POST followed by a redirect back to the page, so the back button
and reload do what they look like they do, a double-tap can't repeat an upload, and there is no
client-side state to lose — a reload is always the truth. Two screens: /admin is the catalogue,
/admin/catering lists the price tables and /admin/catering/tables/{id} edits one.
The catalogue is editable from the site: add an item with a photo and a name, reorder it, rename or reorder the category filters. Nothing there needs a deploy or a migration — which is the point, since the person adding a cake is the person who baked it.
Photos are resized, stripped of EXIF, converted to webp and put in the bucket on upload
(ProductPhotoService, using cwebp from libwebp-tools — the pure-Java encoders either can't write
webp or ship glibc natives that don't run on Alpine).
The catering tables are edited a table at a time rather than a field at a time. That isn't a taste in
interfaces: a column heading, its price and the entries beneath it only mean anything together, so
CateringPackage#arrange takes the whole table and refuses one whose lines and columns disagree. Drop
the middle column on its own and every remaining entry shifts one place left — the Large box then
advertises the Medium box's contents at the Large price, and nothing about the page looks broken.
How that works without JavaScript. One form holds the whole table and every button in it submits
that form; name="do" says which was pressed and its value carries the position it applies to
(remove-column:2). So "add a column" arrives with every cell the editor has typed, adds the column to
what arrived — plus an empty entry on every line — and re-renders. Nothing typed is lost, and only
Save writes: a half-built table with a blank column heading never reaches the live page, and the
aggregate would refuse it anyway. A failed save comes back the same way, with the work still in the
form and the reason above it, because a redirect would throw the work away and leave the editor guessing
which cell the message was about.
The admin only exists when SECURITY_MODE=OIDC. AdminController and AdminCateringController are
@ConditionalOnProperty on it, so a deployment that forgets to configure Authentik gets 404s rather than
catalogue writes open to the internet. /admin/** is an authenticated path, so a browser opening it is
sent to Authentik and comes back signed in. There is no JSON admin any more: AdminProductController,
AdminCategoryController and the old /api/admin/** endpoints existed for the React screen and went
with it. Their logic lives in Catalogue and CateringMenu, which the pages call.
Testing a protected page needs Accept: text/html. curl and MockMvc both send */*, which the
platform answers with a bare 401; only a request that prefers HTML gets the 302 to Authentik. Asserting
the 401 and calling the page broken is a mistake worth not making twice.
Known gap: StorageService has no delete, so removing a product or a photo leaves the object in the
bucket. Harmless — nothing links to it — but it accumulates.
Photos
Re-encoded to webp and uploaded to the bucket once (50 MB of originals → 14 MB), served with a
year-long cache. site.assets.base-url says where they live. The originals remain in this repo's
history. EXIF (including GPS from phone photos) is stripped by the re-encode.
Local development
# the whole site, admin included (needs Postgres on :5432 with an itsthevine database)
mvn spring-boot:run # http://localhost:8080
# the stylesheet, while editing templates — watches and recompiles
cd src/main/styles && npm install && npm run watch
/admin only exists when SECURITY_MODE=OIDC, so a plain local run has the site and no admin. To work
on the admin without an identity provider, run with SECURITY_MODE=OIDC, dummy
spring.security.oauth2.client.* values (see AdminPagesTest for a set that starts without touching
the network) and platform.security.authenticated-paths=/nothing/** so nothing asks you to sign in.
mvn spring-boot:run compiles the stylesheet on the way (the Tailwind step is bound to
process-classes for exactly that reason). -DskipFrontend=true skips both frontend steps for a fast
backend loop — the pages then render unstyled until you build the CSS once.
Templates are cached by default, so a template edit needs a restart; add
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false to a local run if you are editing markup.
Tests need Docker (Testcontainers):
mvn verify
Configuration
| Variable | Purpose |
|---|---|
DB_URL / DB_USER / DB_PASSWORD |
Postgres |
SMTP_SERVER / SMTP_PORT / SMTP_USERNAME / SMTP_TOKEN |
relay for the contact form |
CONTACT_TO / CONTACT_FROM |
enquiry recipient and envelope sender |
CONTACT_HUB_URL |
optional n8n webhook; best-effort, never blocks a submission |
SITE_BASE_URL |
absolute base for og:url |
site.assets.base-url |
photo bucket. Server-side only now — the browser is handed finished URLs |
GIT_SHA |
passed by the image build; becomes ?v= on the stylesheet so a deploy invalidates the cached CSS |
SECURITY_MODE |
OIDC turns on Authentik login and brings /admin into existence. Unset = brochure site, no admin |
STORAGE_ENDPOINT / STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY / STORAGE_SECRET_KEY / STORAGE_BUCKET |
MinIO, for admin photo uploads. Blank endpoint leaves storage switched off |
With SECURITY_MODE=OIDC the app also needs the standard Spring OAuth2 client properties for the
Authentik application — SPRING_SECURITY_OAUTH2_CLIENT_REGISTRATION_* and
..._PROVIDER_*_ISSUER_URI. The starter configures the filter chain, not the identity provider.
A missing CONTACT_TO stops the app from starting. That is deliberate: application.yaml maps it
to platform.contact.to, and an unset variable leaves the property present-but-empty, which is enough
to activate the contact starter. Without the @NotBlank check in platform-starter-contact the site
would come up, show a working contact form, and mail every enquiry to nobody. Better to fail on deploy
than to lose a week of orders.