Frederick Beer Trail

Frederick Beer Trail is a small, independent guide to breweries currently operating in Frederick County, Maryland. Visitors can mark breweries as visited, follow their progress, browse a schematic trail, and use a geographic map. It is a Mudhop project, not an official Frederick County tourism program.

Architecture

The site is static and client-side only: semantic HTML, CSS, small JavaScript modules, and one JSON data file. There is no backend, database, account system, authentication, analytics, or scraping. Leaflet powers the geographic map; map tiles and geographic data come from OpenStreetMap.

Visited state is stored in the browser under frederick-beer-trail:v1 with this shape:

{
  "visited": {
    "attaboy": true
  }
}

Invalid storage is ignored, removed brewery IDs are discarded, and the checklist still works for the current session if local storage is unavailable.

Brewery data

data/breweries.json is the only brewery data source. Its records generate the total, progress, filters, cards, schematic stops, and geographic markers.

To maintain the directory:

1. Add, remove, or edit a brewery in data/breweries.json.
2. Keep id stable after publication; it is the identity used for saved progress.
3. Verify that the business is operating as a brewery at a physical Frederick County location.
4. Confirm the address, official HTTPS website, directions URL, and coordinates.
5. Give the stop a legible trail position in the SVG's 1000 × 560 coordinate space.
6. Update the top-level lastVerified date after reviewing the full list.
7. Run npm run check and preview the result at phone and desktop widths.

Do not add hours, tap lists, ratings, events, or other frequently changing details. Short visit notes are appropriate only when they prevent confusion, such as an event-oriented operation.

Local development

The project has no package dependencies. Node.js 24 is used for validation and the production copy; any local static server can serve the source directly.

npm run check
npm run start

Open http://localhost:8000/. Opening index.html directly will not work because browsers block the JSON request from file: URLs.

Create the exact production artifact with:

npm run build

The generated site is written to ignored dist/.

Deployment

.github/workflows/pages.yml validates, builds, and deploys dist/ on pushes to main. In the repository settings, set Pages → Build and deployment → Source to GitHub Actions. The current canonical URL is https://derailable.github.io/frederick-draft/; update the canonical and Open Graph URLs in index.html if a custom domain is configured later. No CNAME is currently configured.

Credits and license

The map uses Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap data is available under the ODbL; Leaflet is BSD-2-Clause licensed. Project code is available under the repository's MIT License.