Preface
A vinyl fencing company needed a simple system to track warehouse inventory. Requirements included:
- Scanning vendor barcodes to receive items.
- Looking up inventory items.
- Filtering items with shareable, URL-synced links.
- Pre-programmed interface for different item types.
Technical Decisions
Architecture I chose a decoupled architecture: a Vue.js SPA frontend communicating with a Laravel API backend.
Backend Laravel provides a complete, robust framework. Inspired by Rails but built on PHP, it enables a single developer to build full-stack applications efficiently.
Frontend The frontend uses Vue.js and Vite.
- Vite: Faster and easier to configure than Laravel Mix or Webpack.
- Vue.js: Excellent performance and reactive state management.
- UI: Bootstrap 5, which integrates well with Vite + Vue and offers utility and component classes.
Deployment I use Docker to deploy both frontend and backend containers to an Ubuntu server. A Traefik proxy manages access, with NGINX behind it to serve both applications from the same domain. While Traefik can handle this, the NGINX container improves portability.