An application to assist with the most difficult choice of any home bartender, what can I make?

Cocktail App is an application which allows a user to build up their own bar and then be told what cocktails and drinks they can create with what they have in stock.

There are several versions of the application that are currently published, each showing various stages of development and various milestones that have been reached. (NOTE: Earlier versions may still work, however that is not a guarantee since they run off of free services and as such, may time out at any time.)

• MVP: cocktail.williamneild.com
• V2 (The buildout): pre-cocktail.williamneild.com
• V3 (The rebuild): Landing Page: cocktailhub.co, Application: dev.cocktailhub.co

History

The application was originally thought of in late 2022 out of me wanting to make cocktails at home but not knowing what I could make with what I had in stock. And so the idea was born to create an application that would allow me to simply input what I had in stock and then be told what I could make. Although this initially seems like a simple idea, it turns out that it is quite a complex problem to solve, since I did not just want exact matches, but also wanted possible substitutions to be suggested (for example, if I had a certain brand of gin, but the recipe called for a different brand)

MVP (Unnamed)

The MVP was built in a few weeks and was a simple application that allowed a user to input what they had in stock and then be told what they could make. This was built using Next.js, Tailwind, and a Mongo DB and deployed to Vercel.

As shown above, it was a very simple app, but the idea was there, and it worked.

V2 (CocktailApp)

The V2 buildout was started in early 2023 and was to be a complete rebuild of the application, aiming to make it a fully fledged application. This was built using Next.js, Tailwind, and a Postgres DB and deployed to Vercel. Although there were at least 8 months of work put into this version, it was never completed and was abandoned in favor of the V3 rebuild. This was due to the fact that the application was becoming too complex and was becoming difficult to maintain, partial to do with the current state of next.js (constantly updating, new features such as app router, etc.), but also due to the scope of the project growing and due to other responsibilities relating to my final year at University. As a result of this, having the API be integrated into the same codebase as the frontend was becoming a problem, as it was becoming difficult to maintain and deploy.

Now although the backend may have been thrown out, the frontend lives on since that was transferable, and it looks beautiful (well maybe not but definitely compared to the MVP).

V3 (CocktailHub)

The V3 rebuild was started in mid 2024 and was to be another complete rebuild of the application, as before, aiming to make it a fully fledged application. This was built using Next.js, Tailwind, and a Go API, this time not deployed to Vercel, but instead to a Hetzner server. This version is currently in development and is being worked on in my spare time.

This version is being built with a focus on maintainability and scalability, with the frontend, backend, database and the landing page all being separate codebases. This allows for easier maintenance and deployment of each part of the application.