Bar Assistant

Bar Assistant is a self-hosted web application designed to help cocktail enthusiasts and home bartenders manage their bar inventory and discover recipes based on available ingredients. Built as a personal bartending companion, it tracks your ingredient shelf and intelligently suggests cocktails you can make right now, taking into account ingredient substitutes, optional components, and parent-child ingredient relationships to maximize your recipe possibilities. With powerful search capabilities powered by Meilisearch, you can filter recipes by preparation method, alcohol content, glass type, and dozens of other attributes.

Common Use Cases

Home bartenders use Bar Assistant to catalog their liquor cabinet and instantly discover which cocktails they can prepare for guests without running to the store. Cocktail enthusiasts build personal recipe collections by importing recipes from websites or creating custom drinks, organizing them into themed collections for different occasions. Bars and restaurants deploy Bar Assistant for staff training and menu development, with role-based permissions allowing managers to curate official recipes while bartenders suggest additions. Groups of friends share a collaborative bar where everyone contributes ingredients and recipes, making it easy to plan cocktail parties where each person knows what to bring.

Key Features

• Ingredient shelf tracking with automatic cocktail suggestions based on what you have
• Smart ingredient matching with substitutes, optional ingredients, and ingredient hierarchies
• Recipe import from websites via web scraping or manual creation
• Powerful filtering by preparation method, ABV strength, glass type, and custom tags
• Recipe collections for organizing drinks by theme, season, or occasion
• Multi-user support with admin, moderator, general, and guest permission levels
• Multiple export formats including JSON, YAML, XML, Markdown, and print-friendly pages
• Public sharing links for individual recipes or entire collections
• Fast full-text search powered by Meilisearch
• Mobile-responsive web interface via Salt Rim frontend

Why deploy Bar Assistant on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Bar Assistant on a Hostinger VPS provides a reliable, always-accessible platform for your cocktail collection that you can share with friends and access from any device. With dedicated resources, Meilisearch delivers instant search results across thousands of recipes, and Redis ensures fast page loads and responsive filtering. Your recipe collection and personal notes remain private on your own server rather than stored on third-party platforms. Hostinger VPS offers the flexibility to grow your installation as your collection expands, with sufficient storage for recipe images and the processing power to handle multiple users browsing and searching simultaneously during parties or events.