Deccan Queen on Rails Tickets

Self-hosted conference ticketing for Deccan Queen on Rails 2026 — Razorpay payments, GST invoices, QR check-in.

This app exists so an event can sell through its own Razorpay account, avoid per-ticket platform fees, issue its own GST invoices, and retain full control of attendee and payment data. It is also a reusable, single-event Rails ticketing reference rather than a multi-event SaaS platform.

Features

• Separate orders and tickets: one buyer order can contain multiple attendee tickets with snapshotted prices and details.
• Ticket tiers with capacities, sale windows, per-order limits, and live per-tier availability.
• Inventory reserved by paid orders and unexpired pending orders; pending holds expire automatically after 30 minutes.
• Razorpay Orders API and Checkout, with test/live mode recorded in the payment audit log.
• Webhook-authoritative payment confirmation with raw-body signature verification, event-ID deduplication, idempotent confirmation, a browser-callback fallback, and a recurring reconciliation sweep.
• Percent or flat coupons with validity windows, usage limits, and optional ticket-type scope. Totals below Razorpay's ₹1 minimum follow the immediate complimentary/giveaway path.
• GST-inclusive tax invoices using SAC 998596, CGST/SGST for Maharashtra or IGST for interstate sales, Indian financial-year sequences, immutable invoice snapshots, and credit notes for refunds.
• Branded PDFs rendered from HTML/CSS by Ferrum and Chromium: an A5 heritage railway ticket with a QR code and an A4 GST invoice.
• Confirmation email with the invoice and each ticket attached; generated PDFs are archived through Active Storage in Cloudflare R2.
• Avo admin resources plus refund, complimentary-ticket, resend-confirmation, and orders/attendees CSV actions; the sales dashboard shows gross/net revenue, ticket-type capacity, and recent orders.
• Mobile admin QR check-in and attendee search at /checkin, with canceled-ticket handling and per-event-day duplicate guards.
• Sentry error tracking in production, with sensitive request fields filtered.
• Hourly WAL-safe SQLite backups to R2 with seven-day retention.

Tech stack

• Ruby 4.0.6 and Rails 8.1
• SQLite for the app and Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and Solid Cable
• Propshaft, importmap, Turbo, and Stimulus; no Node build
• Ferrum and Chromium for PDFs; Prawn is not used
• Active Storage backed by Cloudflare R2
• razorpay, Avo, RQRCode, and Sentry
• RSpec, Capybara, and WebMock
• A CI-built Docker image published to GHCR and pulled by Render
• Cloudflare for DNS, R2 object storage, and SMTP email delivery

Architecture

Orders::Checkout creates an Order and its Ticket records in one immediate SQLite transaction. Paid and unexpired pending orders reserve inventory. Razorpay handles the browser checkout, but only a verified and deduplicated webhook (or the reconciliation fallback) confirms payment. Confirmation issues the invoice before the delivery job renders and stores the PDFs, then queues the email.

flowchart LR
    A[Storefront] --> B[Orders::Checkout]
    B --> C[Pending Order + Tickets]
    C --> D[Razorpay Order + Checkout]
    D --> E[Verified Razorpay webhook]
    E --> F[PaymentEvent deduplication]
    F --> G[ConfirmOrderJob]
    G --> H[Paid Order + Invoice]
    H --> I[DeliverOrderConfirmationJob]
    I --> J[Ferrum PDFs to R2]
    J --> K[Confirmation email with attachments]
    K --> L[Paid confirmation page]

Loading

Orders totaling less than ₹1 skip Razorpay, complete through the same paid-order path, and enqueue delivery directly.

Local development

Prerequisites

• mise with Ruby 4.0.6 (mise install reads mise.toml)
• Chromium, required when generating invoice and ticket PDFs
• SQLite development libraries

Setup

mise install
bundle install
cp .env.example .env
bin/rails db:prepare db:seed
bin/dev

bin/dev starts the Rails server directly. bin/rails server does the same.

Run the test suite and style checks with:

bundle exec rspec
bin/rubocop

Configuration

Copy .env.example to .env for development. Never commit real credentials.

Razorpay

Variable	Purpose
RAZORPAY_KEY_ID	Razorpay test or live key ID used by Orders API and Checkout.
RAZORPAY_KEY_SECRET	Secret used for Razorpay API access and browser callback verification.
RAZORPAY_WEBHOOK_SECRET	Separate secret used to verify webhook request bodies.

Cloudflare R2

Variable	Purpose
R2_ENDPOINT	Account-specific S3-compatible R2 endpoint.
R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID	R2 API access key for Active Storage and backups.
R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	R2 API secret key.
R2_BUCKET	Private bucket for PDFs and database backups.

SMTP and email

Variable	Purpose
SMTP_ADDRESS	SMTP server hostname. The example uses Cloudflare's SMTP endpoint.
SMTP_PORT	SSL SMTP port; the example uses 465.
SMTP_USERNAME	SMTP username or API token name.
SMTP_PASSWORD	SMTP password or sending API token.
MAIL_FROM	Sender address for ticket and credit-note email.

Seller and GST identity

Variable	Purpose
SELLER_NAME	Supplier legal name printed on invoices.
SELLER_GSTIN	Supplier GSTIN printed on invoices.
SELLER_ADDRESS	Supplier address printed on invoices.

Admin

Variable	Purpose
ADMIN_EMAIL	Email used to seed the first admin account.
ADMIN_PASSWORD	Password used when that admin account is first created.

Sentry

Variable	Purpose
SENTRY_DSN	Enables Sentry error reporting in production when present.

Deployment

Pushes to main run two workflows:

• ci.yml runs Brakeman, Bundler Audit, importmap audit, RuboCop, and RSpec.
• docker-build.yml builds the Linux/AMD64 image, publishes ghcr.io/saeloun/dqor-tickets:latest plus a commit-SHA tag, then asks Render to deploy that image when the RENDER_API_KEY and RENDER_SERVICE_ID GitHub secrets are configured.

render.yaml defines one Singapore-region Render web service with /up health checks and a 1 GB persistent disk mounted at /rails/storage. Puma listens on $PORT; Solid Queue runs inside Puma, so no separate worker service is required. The persistent disk holds the primary, cache, queue, and cable SQLite databases.

Create the Render service from the blueprint, then set its unsynced environment variables:

• RAILS_MASTER_KEY
• RAZORPAY_KEY_ID, RAZORPAY_KEY_SECRET, RAZORPAY_WEBHOOK_SECRET
• R2_ENDPOINT, R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID, R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, R2_BUCKET
• SMTP_ADDRESS, SMTP_PORT, SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD, MAIL_FROM
• SELLER_NAME, SELLER_GSTIN, SELLER_ADDRESS
• ADMIN_EMAIL, ADMIN_PASSWORD

The blueprint also sets APP_HOST=tickets.deccanqueenonrails.com, WEB_CONCURRENCY=1, and RAILS_MAX_THREADS=5. Add SENTRY_DSN to enable Sentry. Point the public hostname to Render through Cloudflare DNS and configure the matching sender domain for email.

Backups

In production, Solid Queue runs BackupDatabaseJob at the start of every hour. The job creates an online SQLite snapshot with VACUUM INTO, gzips it, uploads it as db-backups/YYYY/MM/DD/HHMM.sqlite3.gz in R2, and removes backups older than seven days. If R2 is not configured, it logs a warning and skips the run.

Create a backup immediately:

bin/rails db:backup

Restore an object to a separate verification database:

bin/rails 'db:backup:restore[db-backups/2026/07/19/1200.sqlite3.gz]'
sqlite3 storage/restored.sqlite3 'PRAGMA integrity_check;'

Restore never overwrites the live database. Stop the app and replace storage/production.sqlite3 manually only after the integrity check succeeds and you have preserved the current database.

Razorpay and GST notes

Use rzp_test_... credentials while developing and validating the full checkout flow. Switch all three Razorpay values to the live account before sales open. In the Razorpay dashboard, configure the app's /webhooks/razorpay endpoint and subscribe to order.paid or payment.captured, payment.failed, and refund.processed; use the same webhook secret as RAZORPAY_WEBHOOK_SECRET.

If the site sits behind a CDN or proxy with bot protection (for example Cloudflare's orange-cloud), point the Razorpay webhook at the origin host rather than the proxied domain, or add a rule that exempts /webhooks/* from bot challenges. Otherwise the proxy can reject Razorpay's server-to-server delivery. The reconciliation sweep still recovers any missed webhook, but the direct route avoids the problem entirely.

The app treats prices as GST-inclusive and currently uses SAC 998596 and Maharashtra supplier state code 27. Verify the SAC code, GST rate, buyer place-of-supply rules, invoice wording, and credit-note treatment with your chartered accountant before accepting live payments.

Admin

Run bin/rails db:seed with ADMIN_EMAIL and ADMIN_PASSWORD set to create the first admin. There is no public admin signup route.

• /avo opens the authenticated administration area and sales dashboard.
• /checkin opens the authenticated mobile QR scanner and attendee search.

Change the initial password after deployment through the built-in password reset flow.

Contributing

Bug reports and focused pull requests are welcome. Keep the app single-event and dependency-light, add or update RSpec coverage for behavior changes, and run bundle exec rspec and bin/rubocop before opening a pull request.

License

This project is available under the MIT License.