Checking in your attendees, one ticket at a time.
This is a cross-platform desktop application that handles attendee check-in for events managed with pretix, the open source ticket sales system of choice.
pretixdesk has all features required to be useful but is still in it's early days. Feel free to use it, but do have a backup plan.
This project contains a submodule, so the first command you execute should be:
git submodule update --init
This project is built using Gradle. It requires a JDK in version 9 with JavaFX. As this is currently hard to achieve using OpenJDK, we advise using Oracle's Java distribution. You can then build the project using:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-9-jdk ./gradlew build
You of course need to replace JAVA_HOME with the location of your Java 9 SDK.
We recommend using IntelliJ IDEA as an development environment.
To run the application from the command line, use:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-9-jdk ./gradlew build
To build a stand-alone JAR file for distributing:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-9-jdk ./gradlew fatJar
The JAR file will be created at build/libs/pretixdesk.jar.
To build the windows executable, you can run:
./gradlew createExe
To then create the installer, you will need to download the .tar.gz file of the
Java 9 JRE and unpack it to a folder called jre within the source directory. You also need to
install Nullsoft Install System. Then, you can create
the installer with:
makensis windows.nsi
To build the Ubuntu/Debian package, run ./gradlew fatJar first and then execute:
./packaging/build_deb.sh
If you are on linux, but not on a debian-based distribution that lacks the dpkg command,
a docker image will be downloaded and executed to get the debian toolchain. There is a similar
command build_deb_repo.sh that you probably won't need, except if you are myself reading
this in a couple of years.
The pretixdesk-git AUR package always automatically builds from the latest git revision.
Why Java?
It's not Java, it's Kotlin.
Why Kotlin? You are a Python shop, after all!
Yes, and we still love Python. However, all cross-platform GUI frameworks suck in some way, and their Python bindings are rarely Pythonic or nice to use. Additionally, it is really hard to create good standalone application packages for Windows users for Python. JavaFX isn't perfect as well, but tornadofx has a nice Kotlin abstraction and JFoenix has nice material-design elements.
Additionally, with the choice of a JVM-based language we can reuse lots of code from our pretixdroid Android application, making it easier to bring new features to both platforms.
Why not just a web app?
Ever organized an event and right before the start your internet connection breaks down? You don't want that to affect your processes too much. With a desktop application, we can support slow and unreliable internet connections well.
Why not build a fancy offline-first web app using local storage then?
For the future, we plan adding more advanced features like box office sales to this application. This requires access to a reliable and controlled data storage. Most browsers don't give strong enough guarantees about retention of local storage data that we don't want to trust on.
If you like to contribute to this project, you are very welcome to do so. If you have any questions in the process, please do not hesitate to ask us.
Please note that we have a Code of Conduct in place that applies to all project contributions, including issues, pull requests, etc.
The code in this repository is published under the terms of the GPLv3 License. See the LICENSE file for the complete license text.
This project is maintained by Raphael Michel <mail@raphaelmichel.de>. See the AUTHORS file for a list of all the awesome folks who contributed to this project.
This project is 100 percent free and open source software. If you are interested in commercial support, hosting services or supporting this project financially, please go to pretix.eu or contact Raphael directly.