[HN Gopher] Shelf - open-source asset management software
___________________________________________________________________
Shelf - open-source asset management software
Author : CarlosVirreira
Score : 243 points
Date : 2023-07-10 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| 1z4n4g1 wrote:
| What's the best way to get involved in the development of Shelf?
| Looks like a fun project to contribute to!
| Daviey wrote:
| Visually, it looks GREAT. Thanks for sharing this. I do care more
| about the feature set than the UI tho', so I have some questions.
|
| AM to me is the foundational part of any security management. I
| care about 3 main things: 1) API support (for
| custom tooling) 2) Integration with other tools (Jira,
| Salesforce, etc) 3) Relationships/Dependencies with other
| assets (to determine the blast radius if there is an incident, or
| if this asset can be deco'd and what the impact would be)
|
| Assets are more than just devices, are these catered for?
|
| The feature set looks like it steps into EDM, which is a totally
| different problem space to AM IMO.
| oldandtired wrote:
| Unfortunately, both shelf and snipe are limited asset management
| systems that do not cover the broader asset management situations
| and issues.
|
| Having worked in asset management at one time, the field has some
| quite difficult aspects that are often missed by these relatively
| simple systems.
|
| I am not disparaging what either of these systems do. There is a
| lot of time and effort that has been put into them. However, full
| blown asset management is a much bigger area than most people
| understand or have built systems for.
|
| One asset class that can act as a test case for any asset
| management system that you might like to try your hand at
| building is a multi-story multi-use building. Once you get into
| the weeds on this one, you begin to see just how complex asset
| management is.
|
| One feature of asset management is the oft forgotten maintenance
| sequences and forecasting of maintenance and refurbishment.
|
| A number of other comments here have commented on such aspects
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Agreed, asset management isn't only about knowing and tracking
| what the business possesses. A good system
|
| 1. Separates, but inter-connect the Asssets and CI. An asset
| will never change during its lifecycle. A CI is the actual
| configuration(s) of an asset. It could be a simple laptop
| (asset) with a standard OS (CI, one-to-one relationship), or it
| could be a server (asset) with multiple virtual machines (CI,
| one-to-many relationship)
|
| 2. Will handle the entire lifecycle of the equipment.
|
| 3. Will be an integral part of the purchasing, receiving and
| decommission process.
|
| 4. Will allow you to predict and plan the replacement of old
| assets with a high level of confidence.
|
| The product presented by OP only touches a sliver of what asset
| management is. For some it might be just enough, but most don't
| realize how complex it can become.
| metisto wrote:
| These are fantastic insights!
|
| I'm aware of Snipe-IT, but could you recommend any other
| open-source solutions?
|
| I have a hunch that the scope and requirements of such
| software are often tailored exclusively to enterprises, which
| only comes with a price tag.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| On the open-source side I'm ot aware of any solution that
| covers everything like this from one end to the other.
| robinhood wrote:
| Looks beautiful. Also, congrats on shipping it with a MIT
| license, which is great.
|
| One downside: the blog entries look like it was written by
| ChatGPT or similar.
| xupybd wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a warehouse management system that's open
| source?
| viraptor wrote:
| This looks great - I was looking for something like this and
| other solutions are split into pretty much a) way too expensive
| for a small business using it casually b) very basic systems
| without mobile support. Ended up just using Airtable directly
| with the mobile app - not amazing, but also not bad at all.
|
| One thing I couldn't figure out from the website/GitHub - can I
| attach more than one image to the item? For example I'd like to
| save both the photo and the pdf of the invoice.
| CarlosVirreira wrote:
| Hopefully someone can gain value from this!
| figassis wrote:
| I will definitely use this to manage both my personal and
| business assets. Thank you for sharing, this is great work.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Click through
|
| Look for screenshot
|
| Don't find
|
| Close tab
| mindw0rk wrote:
| There is a link to a product home page...
| feoren wrote:
| Is there? I scrolled through the readme 4 times looking for
| one and couldn't find it.
| spiderice wrote:
| It is in the "About" section of the repo. https://shelf.nu
| sneak wrote:
| The database backing this, Supabase, describes itself as "stable
| enough for most non-enterprise use-cases".
|
| I suppose that means this tool is "stable enough for most non-
| enterprise use-cases", which means I can't use it despite wanting
| to.
| kiwicopple wrote:
| I assure you that you're not going to reach the level of
| enterprise we're talking about there (where some sort of
| sharding strategy becomes important).
|
| Basically - if you would run it on RDS, you can run it on
| Supabase
| spiderice wrote:
| The capabilities of Shelf are going to be the limiting factor
| to enterprise use far before Supabase/Postgres will be.
| alostpuppy wrote:
| On the pricing page, the paid plans are "production ready." I
| wonder how they define an enterprise.
| makestuff wrote:
| Supabase uses PostgreSQL and they support offboarding from
| Supabase so you probably could make this enterprise ready.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| The other day I was looking for a Windows desktop app for
| managing home assets (Where is this tool? What is inside my box
| A1 located in room B?)
|
| There is very little software like that. Everything is a website
| or a smartphone app. I want a Windows desktop program.
| CarlosVirreira wrote:
| We will be releasing a desktop app for this. However, it will
| require internet access.
| atoav wrote:
| For electronics or manufacturing I can recommend inventree.
| https://inventree.org/
|
| It can even do things like defining projects that are made of
| sub-components that are made of parts you may or may not have
| on stock (and if you added a prize for each of the parts it
| will spit out a total cost). It can handle prize brackets etc.
|
| For a most basic system or hobbyist needs this might be total
| overkill tho.
|
| Why not start an excel sheet with everything you have and put
| an location next to the thing? The major work with such systems
| tends to be first entry and then keeping things up to date, so
| starting on a small subset of things and trying it out would be
| a wise way to go about it.
| hommelix wrote:
| From lurking in the German mikrocontroller.net forum there
| are a few hobby alternatives like - EleLa :
| http://www.mmvisual.de/elela/ [ _] - PartDB
| :https://github.com/Part-DB/Part-DB-server
|
| The page on the forum wiki is https://www.mikrocontroller.net
| /articles/Elektronik_Lagerver... [_] and it speaks mostly
| about EleLa.
|
| [*] these links are in German.
|
| EleLa is a desktop app for Windows and Linux written in
| FreePascal with Lazarus PartDB isa PHP server for self
| hosting
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Honestly, some version of a sqlite database and form maker is
| probably all you need.
|
| If Docker is an option and you only need it for a single
| machine, maybe NocoDB?
| insouciance586 wrote:
| Another great open source asset management system to check out is
| Snipe-IT. https://github.com/snipe/snipe-it
|
| I have used it for years both self hosted and with them hosting
| and it's been a great low cost solution for asset management.
| batrat wrote:
| We have more than 6k assets, 2k+ users, hundreds of licences,
| component's, and it's still fast. LDAP, api, tons of filters
| and exports possibilities, selfhosted. Best solution IMO.
| atentaten wrote:
| Nice! I was thinking of building something like this at some
| point.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I tried the hosted demo and IMO it feel way too barebone.
|
| * No basic fields like a serial number, model, etc * You can't
| change the color of a category once created * It lacks the
| ability to make assets templates * No obvious ways to create
| custom fields
| Solvency wrote:
| No custom fields is a wild oversight. Yowza.
| ckluis wrote:
| Having worked with EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) & CMMS
| (Computerized Maintenance Management Software) for 13+ years. I
| agree completely. It also completely misses the "management"
| part by not having any type of maintenance schedules,
| tasklists, & safety/PPE information.
| _joel wrote:
| IT wise, It's been a fair few years since I've been in a
| department that does asset management, we used to use GLPI with
| it's warts and all, which got replace with
| https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox
| deckar01 wrote:
| Replacing QR stickers with a visual tagging model seems like it
| could reduce the friction of data entry dramatically.
| nektro wrote:
| and not a single screenshot in the readme
|
| edit: oh its only on the website
| 725686 wrote:
| What do you guys use for managing digital assets, and by that I
| mean what software is installed where, what usernames/passwords
| are required for operating (databases, 3rd party API, etc), which
| versions, etc?
| whyfor_butToBe wrote:
| [dead]
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Those are notes in my big digital notebook (currently managed
| by Obsidian)
| 9dev wrote:
| Notion. I have a network of related databases and knowledge
| base style articles, interlinked as much as possible so as to
| allow clicking through. This works pretty well for us.
| poidos wrote:
| Is there something like this but for "home" usecases? What's in
| my pantry, how much of y do I have left in my medicine cabinet,
| etc.
| unixhero wrote:
| A wiki or a spreadsheet
| brunoqc wrote:
| maybe grocy
| majkinetor wrote:
| OMG ... information horder in me will resist this temptation.
| emmo wrote:
| Homebox (https://github.com/hay-kot/homebox) is one I've been
| looking at recently. Haven't actually set it up yet though, so
| YMMV.
| gffrd wrote:
| Yes. They're on your face right now, above your nose.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It's only really good for groceries, but if you use Paprika's
| shopping list it will track what you have at home and subtract
| from it as you complete recipes.
| malermeister wrote:
| https://grocy.info/
|
| This is what you're looking for.
| tristor wrote:
| Same question, but more focus on home electronics. I'd love to
| track my appliances and home lab setup better than I do today
| in just a spreadsheet. It'd be nice to get depreciation /
| warranty tracking, diagrams which show tags/position in the
| rack for my home lab. Basically similar to enterprise asset
| management just on a much smaller scale and without needing to
| operate a full ITIL shop + deploy enterprise scale.
|
| I once, many moons ago, barcode asset tagged all my stuff and
| was scanning it into an app that could track where it was in
| your house on a basic 2d wireframe home, which let you report
| for insurance scheduling purposes. Besides just tracking
| generally, knowing what stuff you have that is valuable,
| depreciable, and could be stolen/destroyed is very useful data
| even for individuals.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| As anyone who has done inventory management could tell you, the
| admin involved in keeping your pantry inventory up to date
| would massively outweigh any utility you'd get from this.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yeah, I wrote a simple pantry manager that used both barcodes
| on the food items (used an api to lookup and pre-fill basic
| info) and then small QR codes that I added to the item (to
| track the individual instance), it was my "pandemic project".
| It was cool but not the most user friendly (unsurprising,
| UI/UX are not my strong suits) and it was a little tedious.
| It was relatively easy to write through and I enjoyed working
| on it. I was also tracking things like expiration with the
| intention to have a list of things I should focus on using
| first.
|
| At the end of the day I abandoned it but the tech stack and
| the hardware I bought (small Dymo label printer) actually led
| to me building a side business on top of some of the basic
| ideas behind it which has grown steadily since.
| brunoqc wrote:
| Maybe it could be worth it for only some items that you
| always forget to use before they expire. or if it's for
| saving money by waiting for stuff to get on sale, maybe only
| for items that are really worth it.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| I built this for my chest freezer years ago (including the
| domain chowcaster.com), which used a barcode scanner to
| add/remove items. It worked better than a pantry because 1.
| Less items and typically higher cost, 2. You usually make a
| trip to your freezer and 3. It's hard to know what's in
| there. It basically replaced the clipboard my mom still
| uses to track her freezer inventory.
| brunoqc wrote:
| Good point. Nice.
| [deleted]
| iFire wrote:
| https://github.com/Shelf-nu/shelf.nu/blob/main/LICENCE
|
| License MIT <3
| thetinymite wrote:
| Seems interesting. It would be nice if a user could record
| maintenance events. For example: rotate tires, change oil. Also,
| I would like to upload user manuals - not just hyperlinks.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Request Tracker is an older ticket system that also does asset
| management and can associate tickets with assets.
|
| It can be rather tedious to configure, as I recall, but it can
| do almost whatever you want. Hope you know some perl. Have not
| used it in at least 5 years.
|
| https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-10 23:00 UTC)