Restaurant CMS

A free, self-hosted restaurant management system. One installer gives a restaurant a working POS, kitchen display, menu manager and sales reports on their own hardware.

Free forever. No licence key, no account, no subscription, no telemetry, no paid tier. The restaurant's data lives on the restaurant's machine.

Because the server runs on-site, the POS keeps taking orders when the internet goes down — which for a restaurant matters more than almost anything else.

Status: in development on the v2 branch. Phases 0–5 are done, and Phase 6 is under way — macOS installs from a DMG and runs its own server. Windows and Linux packaging are still to do. See PLAN.md for the roadmap and the decisions behind it. The pre-2023 prototype lives on the UI_Only branch and is not carried forward.

Installing on a Mac · Running your restaurant · Working on Mise

Stack

Layer	Choice
Backend	PocketBase — one binary: database, auth, realtime, file storage
Apps	Flutter — one binary, three role-based shells (POS / KDS / Manager)
Printing	ESC/POS over TCP 9100, with PDF fallback

Running it locally

./server/scripts/dev.sh

First run downloads the pinned PocketBase version into server/bin/ and applies the schema migrations. The admin UI is then at http://127.0.0.1:8090/_/.

Tests

Four backend suites, each spinning up a throwaway database on its own port and tearing it down afterwards. None of them touch your real data.

for s in smoke setup kitchen payments staff; do ./server/scripts/${s}_test.sh; done

• smoke — order numbering, modifier pricing, tax and service charge, voids, table release, and that a forged total is overwritten
• setup — the first-run endpoints, and that bootstrap can never run twice
• kitchen — a bill's status following its lines, and the guards that stop it touching bills which are not in service
• payments — part payments, settlement, discounts, and refusing money against a cancelled bill
• staff — resetting a forgotten PIN, and the guards that stop a manager seizing an owner's account or the venue losing its last owner

Plus the Dart side, including a fake thermal printer on a real socket:

cd app && flutter test

Installing it

On the computer that will run the restaurant, install the DMG and choose Run the restaurant on this computer. The app unpacks PocketBase, starts it, and shows you the address for the tablets. No terminal, no second download, no account.

Build the DMG yourself with ./installer/macos/build_dmg.sh.

Running it from source

See docs/developing.md.

How it is put together

server/pb_migrations/ is the schema, in version control, so a fresh install is reproducible. server/pb_hooks/ holds the rules that cannot live on the client: order numbering and all money math. A point-of-sale system must never let a client tell the server what a bill costs, so every total is recomputed server-side on write and a forged total is simply overwritten.

Menu names and prices are snapshotted onto each order line. Editing tomorrow's menu must never rewrite yesterday's bill.

Two rules the whole system leans on. Money is only ever computed on the server — the app displays totals, it never adds them up. And takings are counted by when a bill closed, not when it was opened, so a table seated before a shift began and settled during it belongs to that shift.

Receipts print over TCP 9100 from the desktop and tablet builds. A browser cannot open a raw socket, so the web build says so rather than failing quietly.

Licence

MIT. Use it, change it, run it in your restaurant, sell services around it — just keep the copyright notice. See LICENSE.