Installation

Coffer is deployed as three Docker containers: a PostgreSQL database, a Spring Boot backend, and an Nginx-served Angular frontend.

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose installed
• Git
• At least 1 GB of available RAM (512 MB allocated to the JVM by default)

Quick start

1. Clone the repositories

You need all three repositories in the same parent directory:

mkdir coffer && cd coffer
git clone https://github.com/verbindolai/coffer2.git
git clone https://github.com/verbindolai/coffer2-ui.git
git clone https://github.com/verbindolai/coffer-deploy.git

2. Configure environment

cd coffer-deploy
cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set at minimum:

# Required — pick a strong password
DB_PASSWORD=your_secure_database_password

# Recommended — enables Numista catalog integration
NUMISTA_API_KEY=your_numista_api_key

See Configuration for all available options.

3. Build and start

docker compose up -d --build

This builds both the backend and frontend from source, starts PostgreSQL, runs Liquibase migrations automatically, and starts the application.

4. Access Coffer

Open http://localhost (or whatever port you configured via FRONTEND_PORT).

The API documentation is available at http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html through the backend container.

Updating

Pull the latest changes and rebuild:

cd coffer-deploy
git -C ../coffer2 pull
git -C ../coffer2-ui pull
docker compose up -d --build

Database migrations are applied automatically on startup via Liquibase.

Stopping

docker compose down

Your data is preserved in Docker volumes (coffer-db-data and coffer-images). To remove all data:

docker compose down -v

Caution

docker compose down -v permanently deletes your database and uploaded images.

Architecture overview

┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────────┐     ┌─────────────┐
│   Frontend   │────▶│     Backend      │────▶│  PostgreSQL  │
│  (Nginx:80)  │     │  (Spring:8080)   │     │   (:5432)    │
└──────────────┘     └──────────────────┘     └─────────────┘
                             │
                      ┌──────┴──────┐
                      │  External   │
                      │    APIs     │
                      ├─────────────┤
                      │  Numista    │
                      │  Swissquote │
                      └─────────────┘

The frontend Nginx server handles static file serving and proxies /api requests to the backend. All three services communicate over an internal Docker network (coffer-network).