Brand case decides whether the catalogue-intelligence service answers at all.
Measured 30 Sep 2026:
/nutrition/Balaji/balaji_..._135g -> health_score 65.3, 545 kcal
/nutrition/balaji/... (our spelling) -> every field null
The brand list resolves ours to theirs, and /brands has slowed to 0.2-2.3s,
which exceeded the 3s client timeout on a cold start. The fallback then asked
under our own spelling, received a well-formed empty record, and cached it as
"no nutrition" for six hours -- so one slow moment silently removed nutrition
and health scores from every product of every brand, looking exactly like data
the agent team had not supplied.
Two changes:
- a result reached without a resolved brand is no longer cached, so the next
request retries rather than inheriting a wrong answer for six hours. A
genuine miss on a resolved brand is still cached, which is the case that
matters for traffic.
- the brand list is warmed in the background at startup, so no shopper is
ever in the path of that call.
Also logs which state the feature is in at boot, the way mail does. With
NUTRITION_BASE unset the endpoint simply omits `nutrition` and `healthscore`,
which is indistinguishable from an unscored product -- this deploy went out
without the variable set and had to be diagnosed by probing the API from
outside.
scratch/nutritionlive prints the exact response for any product by running this
code against the live product row and the live service.
NUTRITION_BASE=https://mcp.nearle.ai.in/api must be set in the deployment
environment. Unset, nothing changes and no product carries either key.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fiesta backend (nearle)
The Go/Fiber API behind the Nearle Daily merchant console, the customer app,
the rider app and the in-store POS terminals. Postgres (nearledb) for
tenants, stores, products, stock and orders; a separate pgvector database for
the global product catalogue; Redis for POS presence; MQTT for the tills.
This page is the map. Each section says what a thing is, how to use it, and where the detail lives.
Run it
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin" # Go 1.24 lives there on the dev Macs
docker compose -f docker-compose.local.yml up -d # postgres :5433, pgvector :5434, redis :6379
go run . # APP_ENV unset → .env.local, listens on :1122
go test ./...
An empty database is not enough — startup runs migrations that assume the
live schema. init/README.md explains loading a schema dump first.
Startup prints what it loaded and where it is pointed:
config: loaded .env.local
config: APP_ENV=local, listening on :1122, database nearle@localhost:5433/nearledb
scan: product search uses openai/all-minilm # or: EMBEDDING_PROVIDER not set, text-only
Configuration
Everything comes from environment variables, read once by config.Load().
| You want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Run locally | Nothing — .env.local is loaded by default |
| Run against production settings | APP_ENV=production go run . (⚠ every write is real) |
| See every variable and what it does | .env.example |
| Add a new setting | Add it to config.Config + Load() + .env.example, and to the cluster (nearle-config ConfigMap or app-secrets Secret in namespace nearle) — a variable in the file and not in the cluster is unset in production |
| Find out why it won't boot | Read the message — it lists every missing variable at once |
Precedence is real environment > .env.<APP_ENV> > .env. The container gets
no .env file at all (.dockerignore); the Dockerfile sets
APP_ENV=production and the values come from Kubernetes.
Full detail, including the committed-credentials situation:
docs/ENVIRONMENT.md.
Layout
main.go boot: config → databases → migrations → routes → MQTT → listen
config/ env-file loading, typed Config, validation
db/ Postgres (nearledb + catalogue), Redis, S3 image store
facade/ wires repositories → services → controllers (add new modules here)
routes/ one file per module; /live/api/v1/web/... (console) and /v1/mob/... (apps)
controllers/ HTTP in, HTTP out — parse, call the service, shape the envelope
services/ the rules; no SQL, no HTTP
repositories/ the SQL; nothing else
models/ request/response and table shapes
messaging/ MQTT ingest from tills, console live stream
utils/ small shared helpers (tokens, geo, embeddings, geocoding)
docs/ integration specs for the frontends and handoff notes
scratch/ one-off read/verify tools run with `go run ./scratch/<name>`
init/ schema/seed for the local database
Every response uses the same envelope:
{ "code": 200, "status": true, "message": "…", "details": … }.
Business outcomes ("out of stock", "not registered") are 200s with a reason
in the body; HTTP errors mean the request could not be served at all.
Adding an endpoint
- Model the request/response in
models/. - Repository method(s) in
repositories/— SQL only, take acontext.Context, returnerror. - Service in
services/— the rules, with sentinel errors (ErrXxxBadRequest,ErrXxxNotFound) the controller can map to statuses. - Controller in
controllers/—BodyParser/Query, call the service, map sentinel errors to 400/404/503, everything else to 500. - Routes file in
routes/, registered inroutes/routes.go. - Wire it in
facade/container.go. - Test the service with a fake repository (see
services/scan_test.gofor the pattern) — no database needed.
services/scanService.go + controllers/scanController.go are a complete,
current example of all seven.
Features with their own docs
| Feature | For | Doc |
|---|---|---|
| Environment & deployment | everyone | docs/ENVIRONMENT.md |
| Scan-to-order (camera → product → nearest store with stock) | mobile app | docs/SCAN_TO_ORDER.md |
| Catalogue import into a store | console | docs/CATALOGUE_IMPORT_INTEGRATION.md |
| POS terminal ingest, login, API | POS / tills | docs/POS_*.md |
| Access-control audit and what is still open | everyone | docs/SECURITY_HANDOFF.md |
Things to know before you get surprised
- There is no auth layer.
customerid/tenantidin a request are trusted.docs/SECURITY_HANDOFF.md§1 is the standing issue. - Login errors mean what they say.
409 Invalid Email= the query ran and matched nobody.500 Login is temporarily unavailable= the database could not answer (it used to be reported as Invalid Email; seeservices/userService.golookupLogin). - Stock is a ledger. Live stock is always
SUM(in) − SUM(out)ofproductstocksat an outlet, never a stored number. Filter on the same expression you display (services/productVisibility.goexplains why). - The catalogue is a different database and must never be reached
through the
nearledbhandle. Its per-brand tables are discovered frominformation_schema; brands appear and columns vary. - Catalogue ids are not stable across re-scrapes;
imageidis the durable key (models.Products.Imageid). - Migrations run on boot and are guarded by
IF NOT EXISTS/ schema checks, not a version table. Read the comments inmain.gobefore adding one — several have bitten before. - One MQTT client id per replica. A second connection with the same id
evicts the first. Never run a local process with the production
MQTT_URL. scratch/tools read production when run with.env.production, and most are read-only. Two are not —termbackfillandcataloguefactsbackfillrepair rows that no endpoint can reach. Both default to a dry run that prints every change and write only when passedapply, and both print the SQL to undo themselves afterwards. A new tool that writes follows that shape or it does not write.
Operations cheat-sheet (Kubernetes, namespace nearle)
kubectl get pods -n nearle # fiesta-0/1/2 (StatefulSet)
kubectl logs -n nearle fiesta-0 | grep -E 'config:|scan:|pos:'
kubectl exec -n nearle fiesta-0 -- env | grep EMBEDDING_
kubectl set env statefulset/fiesta -n nearle KEY=value # adds a var and rolls the pods
kubectl rollout status statefulset/fiesta -n nearle
The embedding model behind scan-to-order is served by the cluster's Ollama
(ollama.krow.svc.cluster.local:11434); docs/SCAN_TO_ORDER.md has the
exact settings and why that model.