Managing an Inventory with PartKeepr

Alexander Podshivalov, 123RF

Taking Stock

Erik Bärwaldt

Staying on top of stock inventory levels will allow you to plan for capacity and profit. PartKeepr will help you out.

Planning ahead as a business person is the basis of commercial success. The more items you have in stock, the more important it becomes to maintain a current inventory overview. Manufacturers also have to stay on top of their parts inventories in order to figure out whether they have adequate quantities of every they need, or whether they are running out of certain parts. Linux and the free software PartKeepr bring organization to your inventory.

Because of the way it is constructed, PartKeepr is suitable for all inventories from small to large. However, this suitability depends on the presence of a professional environment based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP/Python/Perl). The LAMP software stack provides not only a database back end, it also lets an Apache web server issue queries and make entries on the company intranet from any workstation.

PartKeepr, formerly known as PartDB2, is available as free software under the GPLv3 license, and it comes with a large community of users and developers. The software is available in various forms on the project page [1]. In addition to ZIP and TBZ2 archives, there is also a virtual appliance for Oracle's VirtualBox. However, the virtual appliance does not host the current version of PartKeepr, plus it runs without a firewall. As a result, the virtual image, which is approximately 555MB, is suitable only for testing.

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