Files
shopdb-flask/docs/START-HERE.md
cproudlock 534f179ee6 Make main the lean product a site receives
main was 16 days and 259 commits behind the line the product is actually built
on, at contract 0.30.0 against 0.35.0, with no per-PC credential code at all. It
was neither current nor curated - just stale. This brings it forward and, at the
same time, makes it mean something: main is what a receiving site installs, and
nothing else.

WHAT IT CARRIES. Twelve plugins - backups, computers, endpoints, guides,
knowledgebase, machines, network, notifications, printers, slides, tools,
warranty - plus applications, which is manifest-less core and always ships. The
only manifest dependency inside that set is endpoints on computers, and both are
in it, so the closure is self-contained.

WHAT IT DOES NOT. employees, geenforce, measuringtools, printedparts and usb
stay on the site line. So do the Windows installer tree, the VM rehearsal
helpers, the agent tooling config, one site's data loader, the internal audit
and findings records, and the planner spreadsheet. 1,135 tracked files against
1,438.

A REMOVAL THAT BREAKS THE APP IS NOT A REMOVAL, and two nearly shipped:

deploy/site-profile-universal.json still named all seventeen plugins. It is the
file docs/DEPLOY.md tells a site to provision from, so a fresh install would
have failed at `flask plugin apply-profile` with PluginError - the first thing a
receiving site does, broken by the branch meant to serve them. It now names the
twelve that exist, and its comment says the two must agree.

agent/ was never refreshed. Whoever populated this branch copied shopdb/,
plugins/, frontend/ and tests/ from the site line and left the agent tree at its
September state: 22 C# and PowerShell sources missing, including AgentCredentials,
EnrollmentService, AgentHttpFactory and the fleet-alert client, plus one file the
site line had deleted still present. The old tree is internally consistent, so it
compiles, and nothing in CI builds it - every gate was green over a server that
speaks enrollment and per-PC credentials to a bundled agent source that cannot.
Resynced whole.

DECISIONS THIS ENCODES, rather than defers:

- The plugin-authoring lab builds printedparts, whose manifest depends on
  employees, so it could not stay. The lab remains on the site line and main
  ships no build-along tutorial. That is a real loss for an adopting developer
  and is recorded here rather than discovered later.
- Recognition, Training and Recertification notifications are no longer seeded.
  Each splits one notification into a card per employee and renders a photo,
  which needs a plugin this branch does not bundle. Seeding them would offer an
  author a type that cannot resolve anybody. A site that installs employees gets
  them from that plugin's own seed.
- Windows/IIS is documented as the legacy path throughout, and the README leads
  with Docker, because that is what a receiving site gets.

The API description is regenerated for THIS branch - 347 paths and 483
operations, down from 415 and 573 - so the published contract describes what is
here rather than what the site line serves. docs/CONFIG.md lost the two
measuring-tool label keys the code no longer declares, which two lanes had
decided opposite ways.

Suite: 3124 passed, 6 skipped. Naming and style gates pass. The docs gates run
rather than skip, and every index line count is derived from the file it names.
2026-09-19 11:24:40 -04:00

4.8 KiB

Start here

ShopDB is a per-site asset platform: one instance per plant, plugins for what each site tracks. These pages document the server, the plugin contract, and the tools that run on shop-floor PCs.

This page covers the handful of paths people actually arrive on, and the warnings worth reading before you pick one. Anything not here is in INDEX, which lists every task, the smallest page set that answers it, and how many lines that costs. Do not read both: find your row in one of them and go.

Each path below is the shortest correct one, not everything that exists.

I am standing up ShopDB at a new site

Docker is the path, and the only one this line ships.

  1. DEPLOY - clone to first admin on Docker at a connected site. No internet at all: DEPLOY-AIRGAP.
  2. Then load the site's data: CSV-IMPORT from spreadsheets, or IMPORT-API if there is a source database to script against.
  3. Later versions: UPGRADE, after BACKUP-RESTORE.

Just want to look at a build without standing one up? DEV-BUILD-TEST pulls a prebuilt stack onto a Windows box with Docker Desktop.

I am deploying the shop-floor tools

Read FLEET-ARCHITECTURE first - it is one page and it is what makes the rest make sense. It ends with a symptom table that says which piece to open when a bay misbehaves.

ADOPTING-AT-ANOTHER-SITE has worked examples for Intune and for manual installation, and says where each artifact comes from. ShopDB serves the data these tools read; getting them onto a bay is your site's configuration tooling, not ShopDB's.

I am writing a plugin

  1. PLUGIN-QUICKSTART - scaffold and first run.
  2. PLUGIN-HOOKS - the contract. Authoritative, and the one page every other plugin page defers to.
  3. PLUGIN-GUIDE - the conventions every bundled plugin follows and the traps that have actually bitten someone. Walk its checklist before you call a plugin done. Read plugins/warranty/ beside it: it is the smallest bundled plugin that exercises most of the contract.

If it lives in its own repository, PLUGIN-EXTERNAL-REPO, and CONTRACT-STABILITY before you choose a version pin.

I am integrating with the API

  1. llms.txt (also served at /api/docs/llms.txt) - auth, the response envelope, common recipes. Short, and the envelope section is the part people get wrong.
  2. GET /api/docs on any running instance - the full spec, browsable.
  3. COLLECTOR-INTEGRATION if you are feeding data in from a PC, and COLLECTOR-AUTH for how that PC proves who it is.

Something is broken

  • Server: docker compose logs api, then the health checks at the end of DEPLOY.
  • A PC or a bay: the symptom table at the end of FLEET-ARCHITECTURE.
  • An upgrade that went in and then misbehaved: UPGRADE, with BACKUP-RESTORE if data has to come back too.

I am trying to understand why something is built this way

The ADRs. They are the decision record, they say what was rejected and why, they say whether each decision still holds, and they are the fastest way to avoid relitigating a settled question. One ADR answers one question; nothing there is a prerequisite for anything else.

Three things people do not know exist

  • GUIDES - procedures live in ShopDB itself, as typed blocks with checkboxes a technician ticks as they work, instead of a Word document on a share.
  • SECURE-SEND - a one-view expiring link for handing somebody a password. Read its "Before anybody relies on it" section first: there is one thing to test at your site before the first real credential goes through it.
  • DEPENDENCY-SECURITY - every release installs a full inventory of third-party components, so a security team can answer "are we exposed to this advisory" without access to anything here.

Before you read anything else here

Every page opens with a docmeta comment saying what it is for and whether it is still current. A page marked legacy is true but superseded, and a page marked historical is a record of a finished migration or a proposal. Neither is guidance. INDEX lists all of them in one place, at the bottom, so you never have to read one to find out it does not apply to you.