ABStock

Catalogue and commands online

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Clients can now discover your stock and shop online.

ABStock was developed during the global lock-down to help a bookshop keep an activity and a link with its clients. It proved 100% useful. You can have a site on the same model.

Update, November 2022: you can now have a more evolved website with (optional) online payments. Check this demo: https://librairie.abelujo.cc/.

Install it yourself or ask us. Contact us at contact@abelujo.cc.

The website features by default the following pages, all customizable:

• a welcome screen, with:
  • the bookshop's information,
  • a search form,
  • a pre-selection of the books to showcase,
• a form to start searching books. A visitor can search by title, authors, publisher, shelf and ISBN(s).
• a shopping basket, for visitors to add books in
• a confirmation form, which sends the command by email to the shop owner, and a confirmation email to the client,
• a special page to showcase a selection.
  • they can be chosen from Abelujo or defined in a file
• an admin page to change the text shown on different pages, with a rich-text editor: Stylo. New on April, 2022.
  • your admin URL is printed to standard output when you start the app (there are no user accounts). See the documentation.

Here's how searching the stock looks like by default (we can build themes on-demand):

ABStock can load data from several places:

• by default, it connects to the Abelujo database. Abelujo is a free software for bookshops, that manages inventories, sells, and the like. The database is loaded in memory at startup, doesn't access it afterwards, and is synced several times a day.
• it can load data stored in a simple txt format (see cards-example.txt). You can define books, or other products:

Interested? Please get in touch.

Other features

• access a simple admin page to edit the application's texts with a rich editor.
• translate URLs ("/book/" or "/livre/")
• redefine anything with the pre- and post-config files, written in the programming language of the application (Lisp)

Install

ABStock is known to work on:

• SBCL
• CCL

Quick install on Debian Buster 10

update: you can try a self-contained binary for Debian Buster. Download it here. Download it and run it with

./abstock

You do not need to install a Lisp implementation. If you use it, please give us feedback here. Thanks!

Here's the universal recipe to run ABStock from sources:

# create a user for abstock or reuse the user of abelujo
apt install rlwrap sbcl cl-quicklisp git make
git clone https://gitlab.com/vindarel/abstock.git
cd abstock
# Copy or ln you db.db sqlite from abelujo
ln -s /home/abelujo/repo/db.db db.db

sbcl --load /usr/share/cl-quicklisp/quicklisp.lisp --eval '(quicklisp-quickstart:install)' --eval '(ql:add-to-init-file)' --eval '(quit)'
# or /usr/share/common-lisp/source/quicklisp/quicklisp.lisp on Debian 10.
make deps
# install it and run it with
make run
# aka
# rlwrap sbcl --load run.lisp --eval '(in-package :abstock)'
# use ctrl d to exit

Quick install on a Raspberry Pi

SBCL lacks thread support on ARM 32 bits so we'll use Clozure Common Lisp. It's easy to install and its compilation times are stellar.

# in root:
cd /usr/local/src/
wget https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/releases/download/v1.11.5/ccl-1.11.5-linuxarm.tar.gz
tar -xvze ccl-1.11.5-linuxarm.tar.gz
cp ccl/scripts/ccl /usr/local/bin/ccl
rm ccl-1.11.5-linuxarm.tar.gz

# in normal (abstock) user:
# ensure Quicklisp is installed:
ccl -l /usr/share/common-lisp/source/quicklisp/quicklisp.lisp -e '(quicklisp-quickstart:install)(ql:add-to-init-file)(ccl:quit)' -b
ccl --load run.lisp -e '(in-package :abstock)'
# to quit: (ccl:quit) or C-d

Theme

You have several ways to customize ABStock, from CSS tweaking to a full theme rewrite.

1. Write your own CSS rules into src/static/theme.css. This file is always loaded by the base template and is out of source control. You can create a symlink to it.
2. Use Bulma customization capabilities.
3. Change the HTML and CSS content of some pages through configuration variables.
4. Write your own templates and override the default ones. See the documentation: http://abstock.org/#/en/develop

important: for the good of the project, think about sharing your work! Link it in the wiki, send us an email or open an issue. Many thanks in advance.

Here's a real world example theme of ours. You can contact us to have a pretty one too ;)

Deployment

You can run the app as a script:

rlwrap sbcl --load run.lisp --eval '(in-package :abstock)'

or run the binary:

./abstock

If you use the script, you are landed into the Lisp REPL. You can inspect and update the application from there. See (help). You can actually do anything, including installing new Quicklisp libraries. You can connect to the running instance from home through SSH.

HTML changes are automatically taken up by the server. (you can switch this off, this Djula's documentation).

Environnement variables

• AB_PORT to set the port (defaults to 8989). Takes precedence on the configuration file.

Reloading the shelves and the cards in the Lisp shell

When you are in lisp shell and Abstock is runing you can reload the shelves or the cards:

Reload cards

(get-all-cards)

Reload shelves

(get-all-shelves)

Fetch books' summaries

(setf *fetch-summaries* t)

It will fetch the book's summary asynchronously on its datasource (french one supported) when a visitor visits the book's page.

This is not activated by default yet.

Systemd

Build the binary, then in /etc/systemd/system/abstock.service:

[Unit]
Description=Abstock

[Service]
Restart=on-failure
WorkingDirectory=/home/abstock/repo
ExecStart=/home/abstock/repo/abstock --pid PID.txt
User=abstock  # or an existing user
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

then:

systemctl start abstock

to see the logs:

journalctl -u abstock.service [--since today] [--no-pager] [-o json-pretty] [-f]

use -f to follow the logs as they are written.

Swank server - remote control

By default, ABStock will start a Swank server on port (- *port* 5000), to get a number around 400x.

Set the parameter *start-swank-server* to nil in the config file if you don't want to.

That means that we can connect to the running ABStock application on our server, from the comfort of our developer environment at home.

This is specially useful if we start ABStock with SystemD, because we wouldn't get a Lisp REPL. But we still want access to a REPL, for poking around and throwing quick commands in.

From your machine at home, forward the port of the remote server to localhost:

ssh -L4006:127.0.0.1:4006 username@example.com

and now do M-x slime-connect, choose localhost and your port 4006. See the Cookbook.

Develop

You can contribute HTML, CSS, JavaScript, testing, documentation, and Common Lisp code. Thanks in advance!

Install the application locally.

Static assets. Themes.

CSS and JavaScript files are served from the src/static directory under the /static prefix (see *default-static-directory* in web.lisp).

You must reference them like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/style.css">

You can use theme.js and theme.css for your own code.

You can use Bulma's mechanism to create new themes: https://bulma.io/documentation/customize/

Live reload

To get live-reload of static files during development, you can use browser-sync.

$ browser-sync start --proxy http://localhost:8901/ --files src/static/*
[Browsersync] Proxying: http://localhost:8901
[Browsersync] Access URLs:
 -------------------------------------
       Local: http://localhost:3000
    External: http://192.168.1.11:3000
 -------------------------------------
          UI: http://localhost:3001
 UI External: http://localhost:3001
 -------------------------------------
[Browsersync] Watching files...
[Browsersync] File event [change] : src/static/style.css
[Browsersync] File event [change] : src/static/style.css
[…]

Now, whenever you edit some CSS or JS, you see the results instantly in the browser.

Use the API

ABStock defines API endpoints, free for the developer to use to create new applications:

• /api/v1/selection.json: get the selection.
• /api/v1/lastcreated.json: get the last created books. Results are cached for 1 hour.

Issues and feature requests

Issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/vindarel/abstock/-/issues

GitHub mirror: https://github.com/vindarel/ABStock

Known TODOs:

• admin panel
• read products data from a TXT, CSV or a JSON file
• [-] i18n / remove a few still hardcoded words
  • (we managed to translate it, with the config and by overriding templates)
• [-] online Stripe payments
  • done upstream in the master software.
• simple stats

Changelog

• 2022, June: the cache files cards.lisp and shelves.lisp were renamed with a .lisp-expr extension.

Licence

AGPLv3.

The src/static/img/no_cover.png image is a modified version of this original one that is distributed under CC-BY-SA (Ssire).

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Lisp?! Oh yes, Lisp.

• https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/pythonvslisp/
• https://lisp-lang.org/success/
• https://common-lisp.net/
• https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl
• https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/