Grainfather Dashboard API#69

Unlike seemingly many people on this forum, I love the new features and web functionality.

I’d love it if there was basic API access to the Dashboard content, particularily Recipes and Brews, so that I could automatically update my 3rd party website with live data about what I’m currently fermenting, conditioning, serving, etc.

Would be a seemingly easy thing to do and would enable a lot of people to effectively advertise your product, for free, on their personal sites. I’d honestly love the ability to publicise what I’m brewing and the details of that brew by pulling from your Dashboard.

Hi @Josh Thomas,

Great suggestion!

We’d like to explore this a little more - to both find out what your particular use case is, but also to see if others in the community have similar or different use cases.

By the sounds of it, you are experienced enough to be able to work with an API and use it to display content on your site in whatever way you want to.
If you wouldn’t mind sharing a few more details about your site, we’d love to understand our options for providing a feature like this:

• What is the URL to your website?
• What is your website built with? (i.e are you using a CMS or is it something custom?)
• What information would you expect us to provide?
  I’m assuming:
  • Recipe name
  • Brew date
  • Brew status
    But I’m curious to know what would be important to you.
• Whilst we could expose an API, this requires you and anyone else keen to do something similar to write your own code to display this. Would an embed/widget make this easier? If so, what functionality would be important to control through the widget?

I look forward to hearing your feedback, Josh, and to anyone else interested in similar functionality - please provide your feedback along the same lines as what I have requested from Josh.

Thanks!

Hey James - thanks for the quick reply!

So to dig in, I’m head of Innovation for a digital marketing & innovation agency called Brandwidth. Url is www.brandwidth.com and while it’s currently built in Wordpress, that might be thrown out the window here soon and entirely rebuilt.

Either way, both me and my company would be more than comfortable with an API, as it gives us flexibility to build the data natively into our website rather than being forced to embed a widget.

So before I go into the specific use case I have in mind, here are some high level methods and properties I kinda had in mind:

1.) a method that returns My Brew Sessions as an array, broken into status (planning, fermenting, conditioning, serving, completed), name, equipment (one of the many opportunities for a shout out to Grainfather here), brewing date.

Maybe some properties to turn various status’s on/off - but this is really a nice to have rather than a need to have.

2.) Some sort of Recipes interface that would allow me to pull: brewer name, beer name, beer style, beer abv, beer cover photo, and possibly even the properties and recipe stats.

Ultimately for the use case, its a way for me to publicise why we bought the Grainfather to begin with! We’re a bunch of engineers who love to make things, and we love to drink beer - so what’s better than to make our own beer from grain to glass?

We already have clients from around the world flying over to check out our little nano office brewery, and it’s insanely well recieved with them that we’re so obsessed with Making that even our beer is custom. I’d love to publicise that fact on our website, and have a dynamic section that outlines to our clients (or potential clients) what we are working on, whats fermenting, and what’s on draft in the office now!

Your web interface is the perfect spot to manage our setup, and I’ve already intuitively started adminning everything from it, so it would be a super realistic proposal that me as the office ‘head brewer’ would simply shift beers around in your web interface and it would automatically populate/update on our company homepage.

Finally, I think it would obviously be absolutely approprate to do a little bit of shameless self promotion here, sprinkling in a few mentions in the data pulls that mentions Grainfather, essentially getting your guys brand name on any personal homepage, company homepage, or beer brewing blog that decides to use the API to communicate what they’re brewing to the public!

If you think you might want to explore this, not only would I be happy to be your test bunny, and I could even allocate some web resources on our end to help with the testing! Feel free to obviously reach out here, but also find me at josh.thomas(at)brandwidth(dot)com

Cheers dude!
-Josh

James,
as a programmer I would like to have REST APIs, where I can extract via a program a whole recipe or a whole brew. In the application I can then decide which data I need.
I could think about an external ingredient management, bottle label printing, WEB integration like Josh said and so on.

Personally I would host the REST API documentation on GitHub (or an other Git hoster), to build up an open source community.

An API would open op a complete new world of features.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed! I’d be more than happy to be a test bunny for any API development - I have a team of developers who would be more than happy to play with a beta version of anything you have going on!

Thanks for the feedback thus far.

I’ll pop this on our roadmap and include the feedback you’ve all shared above.

I can’t promise timelines or anything, but I will update this task when we begin working on it.

I’m with @Dieter on this. A REST API that uses JSON responses would be my preferred choice. Auth via an API key or some sort of token-based auth would be nice too. This would also be easy to build a “wrapper” library to use in a programming language of choice later down the road as well. Can’t wait to see the next steps on this.

Are there any news of current status or is the api still on the dev. roadmap? Thx in advance!

Hi there, any new on this, It would be great if my fermenter could retrive the the fermentation profile and set it self up!

FYI
API are ok but if they interfer with people brewing because you want to advertise other products I am OUT. I did not buy Grainfather products to be inidated with spam. Or with adds.
If your API are tracking software We are Out as well.

I would also like to have a rest API to build an app to my https://tidbyt.com/ :)

@Martin Gall I’d help you out getting https://github.com/hez/brew_dash working if you want. Shoot me a ticket on Github and we can chat

Any update on API availability?

I’ve done reverse engineering for APIs used on the app and the community website. On a base of this I’ve done Home Assistant integration - https://github.com/fidley/grainfather_integration. I can share the Postman collection if someine is interested, but I would need to clean it up from my credentials. Drop me an issue on github if you want to have the collection, I’ll prepare in short time then .