SmartTech e-shop

About the project

What you can try

• Search that forgives typos (try "samsng"), with suggestions while you type
• Filters for price, brand, colour, memory, display size and system, each with a live count of matching phones
• Filtering, sorting and paging without page reloads, with clean URLs you can share
• Three-step checkout with delivery and payment options, also as a guest
• The cart is saved when you log out and merged when you log in again
• The whole shop in English, German and Slovak
• Admin area for products and photos

Highlights

• Fuzzy search with PostgreSQL trigrams and live suggestions
• Filters, sorting and pagination without page reloads
• Guest checkout, cart kept across sessions, stock tracking
• Automated tests in GitHub Actions, Docker Compose deployment

Under the hood

• About 84 feature tests run against PostgreSQL in GitHub Actions
• I replaced the cart library with my own class after finding that saved carts could never be restored: PostgreSQL cut the serialized text at the first null byte
• Typo-tolerant search with PostgreSQL trigram similarity
• Docker Compose with PHP-FPM, nginx and PostgreSQL, a nightly demo reset, rate limiting and a health check

Architecture

1. 1BrowserServer-rendered Blade pages styled with Tailwind CSS
2. 2Tailscale FunnelPublic HTTPS from a sidecar container
3. 3nginxWeb server in front of PHP-FPM
4. 4LaravelCatalog, cart, checkout and admin on PHP-FPM; a scheduler container resets the demo every night
5. 5PostgreSQLProducts and orders, with trigram search

Changelog

• Tests written first, then Laravel 8 and PHP 8.1 to Laravel 13 and PHP 8.5, one major version at a time
• Tailwind CSS from the CDN to a local Tailwind 4 build
• PostgreSQL 18