austinandClaude Opus 5
8d54db7c30
MARKETING, not decoration — each of these was a page that stopped:
- The HOMEPAGE never mentioned catering. A customer found the page by reading the nav. It now has a
section with a photo, what the three tables cover, and a button.
- PRODUCTS was a title and a grid. It gets a line saying what it is ("cakes and decorated cookies are
made to order, so most of what follows started as somebody describing what they wanted") and a closing
band with somewhere to go — an order, or the catering page.
- CONTACT was a form and nothing else. The things somebody on that page actually wants — when we're open,
where we are, the phone number — were on the homepage and in the footer but not there. Now beside the
form, with a card pointing at catering.
- OUR STORY got the shop's own front as a band and an ending, so the story leads somewhere.
- The FOOTER gained the opening hours, which is what people come to a bakery's site for and is now on
every page.
CLEANED UP ON THE WAY. The hours and the address were about to exist in three places, so they are one
fragment (fragments/visit.html) that takes the classes that vary by where it sits — cream in the footer,
sage on white in a card. A shop that changes its Saturday hours should change them once.
STYLES MOVED to src/main/styles, with the rest of the app's source, and split by what each file is for:
theme.css (the fonts and the palette — names, nothing drawn), base.css (bare elements), components.css
(the site's own classes), admin.css (the admin's controls), and site.css as the entry that imports them in
cascade order and declares what Tailwind scans. It was one grab-bag file called tokens.css in a folder at
the repo root. node_modules has to stay beside them — Tailwind resolves `@import "tailwindcss"` by walking
up from the CSS file — so the whole npm project moved together, and the pom, .gitignore and README moved
with it.
53 tests green, `mvn package` builds the stylesheet from its new home, and every class used on all five
pages resolves in the compiled CSS (185/159/175/148/140, none missing).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
10 KiB
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 |
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.