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. 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 through ProductCatalog.
• /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 through CateringMenu) 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". Money is 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/contact still exists and answers JSON; both go through Enquiries, 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 are enquiry.delivered = false. Validation and delivery come from platform-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, and fragments/head.html lays them out. SiteControllerTest asserts 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 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.