pretix – behind the scenes

We’re looking for a Sales Manager. For now, we’re looking for someone who is fluent in German, so please excuse us for writing this post in German. Thank you!

pretix comes with a test suite of currently 2167 tests. When executing these tests, 81 % of pretix’ codebase is run. These tests are intended to verify that pretix is operating correctly and errors and regressions are spotted early. Having such a test suite saved us from a lot of major problems in the past and will hopefully continue to do so in the future.

In my last blogpost, I described our hosting setup for pretix.eu in detail and talked about the efforts we take to achieve a resistance against failing servers: The system should tolerate the failure of any single server at any given time and keep running. Well, up to now, this was only nearly true.

This night, pretix.eu had a planned outage for around 70 minutes to allow us to make a fundamental change to our service architecture. In this blogpost, we want to go into detail on what we changed and why. We hope this might be insightful for you if you run a similar service or if you are just curious about the challenges we experience along the way.

In version 1.8 of pretix, we introduced shipping management as a new feature for the pretix Hosted and Enterprise editions. With this plug-in, you can choose not to deliver your tickets to your visitors as a downloadable file, but to send them via snail mail instead. Of course, you can just download those tickets as regular-sized PDF files, print them out and ship them, but the feature is usually most interesting if you want to send out high-quality tickets that look good e.g. in a gift wrapping under a christmas tree or pinned to a wall as a souvenier of the event.

Being somehow experienced with software development, we are still early in the process of learning how to get pretix to the right customers and turn pretix into a sustainable and profitable project. As one of many experiments on this journey, we presented at a major trade fair for the first time this week. With this blog post, we want to give detailled insight into the process, our decisions and our new experiences. If you are preparing to go on a trade show for the first time, this might give you valuable insight – or just a fun read.

Welcome to behind.pretix.eu! What is this, you may ask? Yes, pretix already has a blog at pretix.eu but we sometimes want to share some backstage information with you that might be interesting to some of you who maintain open source projects, run software services or create businesses yourself.