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Version: 0.3.0

Demo mode

Demo mode installs a ready-made demo account and tenant so visitors can try Openbeehive with realistic data, without touching anyone's real records. It's off by default and meant for public showcases and testing.

What it sets up​

When enabled, Openbeehive creates:

  • a demo account (demo@app.openbeehive.org / demo by default),
  • a demo tenant with 15 hives across 4 apiaries,
  • a season of data: queens, 105 inspections (7 per hive, spread over the trailing ten months, with temperature, humidity, varroa, weight and more), a honey harvest and two varroa treatments per hive.

The data is re-seeded every hour, so the showcase always looks the same — a visitor can edit freely and everything returns to the canonical set on the next reset.

When someone is signed in to the demo account, the app shows a banner reminding them they're in the demo and that data resets hourly.

Enabling it​

BEEHIVE_DEMO=true

That's all you need. Enabling demo mode automatically turns on email/password sign-in so the demo account can log in. Optionally override the credentials:

BEEHIVE_DEMO_EMAIL=demo@app.openbeehive.org
BEEHIVE_DEMO_PASSWORD=demo

Restart the server. You'll see a log line confirming the demo was installed, and the demo account can sign in immediately. Because demo mode implies password auth, the instance also needs its dedicated admin (BEEHIVE_ADMIN_EMAIL and BEEHIVE_ADMIN_PASSWORD, see Authentication), and the admin email must differ from the demo email.

Showcase hosts: skip the login screen​

On a host that exists only to show the demo, you can sign visitors in automatically:

BEEHIVE_DEMO_AUTOLOGIN=true

Anonymous visitors land straight in the demo tenant instead of on the login screen. Leave this off on an instance that also serves real users, so they get the normal sign-in page with the demo button on it.

How it's isolated​

  • The demo lives in its own tenant; the hourly reset only deletes and rebuilds demo data, never other tenants.
  • Real users on the same instance are unaffected — they have their own tenants.
caution

The demo account is a real, sign-in-able account. On a public instance, pick a demo password you're comfortable sharing, and don't reuse it elsewhere. Leave BEEHIVE_DEMO=false on private instances that don't need a showcase.

Turning it off​

Set BEEHIVE_DEMO=false (or remove it) and restart. New sign-ins to the demo account stop working; existing demo data remains until you remove it. The demo account and tenant are named demo-user / demo-tenant internally if you want to delete them from the database.