Chartbrew Docs

Prerequisites

NodeJS v20+ (use only even versions)

NPM

MySQL (v5+) or PostgreSQL (12.5+)

Redis (v6+)

Getting Started

Installation & Setup

TIP

The setup doesn't work in Windows PowerShell or cmd.exe. If you're using Windows, please use a bash command line like Git Bash or cygwin

Create a Chartbrew database

Chartbrew works with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. You can use any of the two, but you need to create a database first.

Follow the instruction here.

Get and setup the project

git clone https://github.com/chartbrew/chartbrew.git
cd chartbrew && npm run setup

Set up the environmental variables

All the environmental variables that need to be set are found in the .env-template file in the root folder of the project. If you ran the setup above, you should already have a .env file there as well. If not, copy the template file and rename it .env.

Make sure you fill out the production and development sections accordingly.

See the full list of variables here

Run the project locally

Open two terminals, one for front-end and the other for back-end.

# frontend
cd client/
npm run start

# backend
cd server/
npm run start-dev

Set up Redis for automatic dataset updates

Chartbrew uses queues to update datasets automatically and it uses Redis to achieve this. In order for your datasets and charts to update automatically, you need to set up Redis first.

Find out how to set up Redis on various platforms here..

Tech stack

Backend

• NodeJS
• ExpressJS
• Sequelize ORM
• Nodemailer
• BullMQ
• Redis

Frontend

• ReactJS
• Redux
• NextUI
• ChartJs

Docs

• Vitepress

Environmental variables

The table below shows the production variables. The development variables have the same naming, but they are appended with _DEV (example: CB_DB_NAME -> CB_DB_NAME_DEV)

Variable	Default value	Description
CB_DB_NAME required	chartbrew	The name of the database
CB_DB_USERNAME required	No default	The username of the user that has access to the database
CB_DB_PASSWORD	No default	The password associated with the database user
CB_DB_HOST required	localhost	The host address where the database is located
CB_DB_PORT	3306	The port of the hosting address
CB_DB_DIALECT required	mysql	Which database to use between mysql and postgres
CB_DB_CERT	No default	If your DB requires an SSL connection, use this variable to provide the string value of the certificate
CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY required	A key will be generate for you during the first run	A secure 32 bytes string which is used to encrypt the data in the database. Click here to see how you can generate a key.
CB_REDIS_HOST	localhost	The host address where the Redis server is located
CB_REDIS_PORT	6379	The port of the Redis server
CB_REDIS_PASSWORD	No default	The password for the Redis server, if required
CB_REDIS_DB	0	The Redis database number to use
CB_REDIS_CA	No default	The string value of the certificate
CB_API_HOST required	localhost	The address where the server app is running from. This variable is used internally by the server app. This value is overwritten by the PORT variable (if set)
CB_API_PORT required	4019	The port where the server app is running from. This variable is used internally by the server app
VITE_APP_CLIENT_HOST required	http://localhost:4018	The full address where the client app is running from. This variable is used in the client app and it's populated during the building process. Note The app needs to be restarted/rebuilt when this value is changed.
VITE_APP_CLIENT_PORT required	4018	The port where the client app is running from. This variable is used in the client app and it's populated during the building process. Note The app needs to be restarted/rebuilt when this value is changed.
VITE_APP_API_HOST required	http://localhost:4019	The full address where the server app is running. This variable is used by the client app. Note The app needs to be restarted/rebuilt when this value is changed.
CB_MAIL_HOST	smtp.gmail.com	The server host of the email provider
CB_MAIL_USER	No default	The username used to log in on the email server
CB_MAIL_PASS	No deafult	The password used to log in on the email server
CB_MAIL_PORT	465	The port used to connect to the email server
CB_MAIL_SECURE	true	true - Use SSL to connect to the email server false - Use TLS to connect to the email server
CB_ADMIN_MAIL	[email protected]	The email address used to send the emails from
CB_RESTRICT_TEAMS	0	0 - New users will have their own team created on sign-up. 1 - New users don't have a team on signup and can't create their own.
CB_RESTRICT_SIGNUP	0	0 - Anyone can create accounts from the signup page 1 - New users can only sign up using invite links
CB_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID	No default	Google app Client ID generated from the Console (Needed for Google integrations)
CB_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET	No default	Google app Client Secret generated from the Console (Needed for Google integrations)
CB_BACKEND_WORKERS	4	Some background tasks in Chartbrew will use workers to spread work on multiple threads. Still testing, but for best performance, set this to the number of threads your CPU has

Generate the encryption key

You will need a 32 bytes AES encryption key for the CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY variable. Chartbrew generates both CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY and CB_ENCRYPTION_KEY_DEV for you during the first run, but if you wish to have control over the value, you can generate it yourself.

Run the following command to generate a valid key:

node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('hex'))"