quicktill is Copyright (C) 2004–2018 Stephen Early sde@individualpubs.co.uk

It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see this link.

The software, "quicktill" is difficult to configure, but once configured, it is easy for staff to use. Currently, all Individual Pubs Ltd pubs uses this software. Occasionally this software is used by EMFcamp and London Hackspace.

At the moment I'm not guaranteeing that changes from one release to the next won't break existing configuration files, although I aim to avoid this where possible. The database schema can also change; SQL commands to update existing databases are shown in commit messages. Generally schema changes can be made before installing the updated release, and won't affect older versions of the software; config file changes must be made after installing newer versions of the software and aren't backward-compatible. (So, to upgrade smoothly: make database schema changes, install the new version, then update the config file to enable any new features you need.)

The first hurdle is finding a suitable keyboard! I generally use 16x8 matrix keyboards from Preh (MCI128), configured so that on each keypress they output a sequence of keystrokes giving the coordinates of the key that was pressed, for example [A01] for the bottom-left and [H16] for the top-right. If you have a different type of keyboard, or it is set up differently, it's fairly easy to write a new keyboard driver: see quicktill/kbdrivers.py

quicktill is quite a complicated program to configure. You should start with an example configuration file, examples/haymakers.py, and edit it according to your needs.

You must create a postgresql database and make it accessible to whichever user is running the till software. Name this database in the configuration file.

Put a URL pointing at the config file in /etc/quicktill/configurl (eg. file:///home/till/configweb/haymakers.py)

Create database tables:

runtill syncdb

Get a draft database setup file and edit it:

runtill dbsetup >database-config
(edit database-config)
runtill dbsetup database-config

Create initial users; these will be superusers that can do anything, you can use the user management interface once the till is running to restrict them once you have other users set up:

runtill adduser "Built-in Alice" Alice builtin:alice
runtill adduser "Built-in Bob" Bob builtin:bob

Run in "stock control terminal" mode and enter your initial stock (this mode doesn't require a special keyboard)

runtill start

Run in "cash register" mode, create stocklines, bind them to keys, put your stock on sale, and sell it:

runtill -c mainbar start

Set up the built-in web server: install nginx and uwsgi, then create the django project:

apt-get install nginx-full uwsgi-plugin-python python-django
django-admin startproject --template=quicktill/examples/django-project tillweb

Edit the created tillweb/tillweb/tillweb/settings.py file for your pubname and database, then start the server:

tillweb/start-daemon

Put tillweb/start-daemon in crontab to start on reboot.

• runtill script calls quicktill.till.main()
• main() reads /etc/quicktill/configurl if possible to find default config file location
• main() parses command line options (overriding config file location if necessary)
• main() reads config file and executes it as a python module "globalconfig", with globalconfig.configname set from the command line (or "default" if not supplied)
• main() looks for globalconfig.configurations[configname] and bails if not found
• main() sets up logging based on command line options
• main() looks for keys in globalconfig.configurations[configname] and sets parameters throughout the library (mostly in tillconfig, but some in eg. printer)
• main() runs the command that was specified on the command line

Assuming the command was "start":

• quicktill.till.runtill() initialises the database engine
• runtill() invokes quicktill.run(), which invokes quicktill.ui._init() via the curses wrapper that catches exceptions and returns the display to a sane state on exit
• quicktill.ui._init() enters the main event loop

Another useful command is "dbshell", which starts an interactive python interpreter with a database connection already set up, a session started, and the td module and models.* already imported. So for example, to get a list of departments:

>>> td.s.query(Department).all()

A list of transactions in the current session:

>>> Session.current(td.s).transactions

A list of sessions and their totals (in a single round-trip to the database):

>>> from sqlalchemy.orm import undefer
>>> [(x,x.total) for x in td.s.query(Session).options(undefer('total')).all()]