For 2026 I opted to serve a dual role for the Horsemen of the Hopocalpse homebrew club - VP and IT Guy. To reduce friction around a monthly style competition for members, I looked inot hosting an instance of BCOEM .

Claude Sonnet 4.5 helped me dockerizing the latest release version and was happy to get MySql and PhpMyadmin running alongside the BCOEM code. Then I started looking at hosting options.

Claude was super happy to write a Terraform file for a multi-zone High Availability boon-doggle hosting solution that was going to cost $180 per month. That seemed excessive for a non-profit, hobby club with 15 monthly users and little downside when the application was unavailable. Then I asked Claude about AWS Lightsail and learned that it would be about $15 per month, which more reasonable, but would be an ongoing expense.

Being cheap, I looked for ways to expose the Docker setup running on my laptop to my friends in the club. That is when I learned about using a CloudFlare Tunnel. This seemed like it might work well, but I worried about the laptop going to sleep while folks were trying to register or judge beers. I did’t want to get into the free support business, even for a homebrew club.

I wondered if a Raspberry Pi 5 would be capable of hosting the BCOEM software, so I asked Claude and Perplexity about the feasibility. They agreed that a Pi could handle our meager usage requirements. Thus launded a sidequest. I learned that a local MicroCenter did indeed have Raspberry Pi 5 models in stock for immediate pickup. I could also source a health sized microSD card from them as well.I didn’t know that I might also need a micro HDMI cable and power supply. That oversight put a small crimp in my hosting plans.

The Raspberry Pi site is helpful and informative. I downloaded an imager from them and created the SD cart to boot the Pi. From the documentation I learned how to enable SSH connections. And, since I didn’t have a way to “see” the Pi desktop, I learned about VNC as well as Raspberry Pi Connect.

I used an SSH connection to update and install other supporting bits of software prepping the Pi to host BCOEM. Changing configuration settings for BCOEM using nano seemed tedious. Instead, I installed VS Code onto the Pi and edited the config files like a human being, not a *nix admin.

It took most of one day from the shopping trip to final configuration and I was ready to share a CloudFlare link with my club mates 😀. In 2026 we won’t use google forms and “secret” numbers. We’ll be using a Raspberry Pi 5 hosted version of BCOEM to enter and judge our beers. 🍻🏴‍☠️