Printing & the print agent

Sofra prints kitchen, bar, pickup, packing and cancel tickets. Manual printing of bills, receipts and kitchen tickets works on every plan. Automatic printing (printers, rules, the print agent and the print queue) is available from Pro.

How it fits together

Order action  ->  Print event  ->  Print rule (when / what / where)  ->  Print job (queue)  ->  Printer
                                                                          |
                              browser Print Queue page  OR  print agent on the branch PC

• Printers are the hardware at a branch.
• Print rules say *when* something prints, *what* document, on *which printer*, and how many copies. Rules start switched off; nothing prints automatically until you create and enable one.
• Print jobs are queued with a frozen copy of the data, so a retry or reprint never depends on the live order and a retry can never print two copies.

Add a printer

Go to Settings → Printers and choose Add Printer.

Use Test print to send a sample ticket and confirm the printer is wired up. Network and USB printers report online/offline status through their agent. Deleting a printer disables any rules that pointed to it, so nothing queues for a printer that no longer exists.

Print rules

Go to Settings → Print Rules. Each rule has:

Typical setup: a rule “Kitchen tickets” that prints a kitchen ticket when items are sent, for the Grill station, on the kitchen printer; and a rule “Bar tickets” for drinks on the bar printer. Turn each rule on when ready. If a plan is downgraded the rules are kept but stop firing.

When each trigger fires

Print queue

Operations → Print Queue shows recent jobs and their status: queued, printing, printed, failed or cancelled. On a device serving browser-queue printers, choose Start printing to let that device pick up and print jobs, and Pause printing to stop. From the queue you can retry or cancel jobs, subject to permission. Claims that are never acknowledged are offered again after a short timeout.

The print agent

To print silently on network and USB printers, install the print agent on a PC in the branch (Windows recommended). It polls Sofra over HTTPS, so no inbound ports are needed.

Sofra (cloud)  <-- HTTPS --  Print Agent (branch PC)  -- TCP :9100 / USB -->  Thermal printer
 print rules + queue          render ticket -> image -> ESC/POS

Tickets are rendered from your template by Edge or Chrome and printed as an image, so what comes out matches the on-screen preview exactly, including right-to-left languages such as Urdu and Arabic.

1. 1

   Install prerequisites

   Install Node.js 20 LTS. Microsoft Edge or Chrome must be installed (Edge ships with Windows).

2. 2

   Install the agent

   Copy the print-agent folder to the PC, for example C:\SofraPrintAgent, and run npm install.

3. 3

   Create the agent in Sofra

   Go to Settings → Printers → Print agents → Add agent. Copy the configuration shown into config.json. The token is displayed once; only a hash is stored. You can rotate it later or revoke it, which stops it working immediately.

4. 4

   Check the connection

   Run npm run check. You should see that it connected to Sofra as your agent and probed each printer.

5. 5

   Add your printers

   In Sofra choose Add Printer, pick *Network printer via print agent* or *USB / Windows printer via print agent*, select the agent, and press Test print.

6. 6

   Run it

   Run npm start. To start with the PC, use Task Scheduler (trigger: At startup) or install it as a service with NSSM.

7. 7

   Create print rules

   Add and switch on the rules that decide what prints where.

npm install
npm run check   # verify the token and probe printers
npm start       # run the agent

Agent commands

config.json

Permissions

Printing has its own permissions: printing:view, printing:print, printing:reprint, printing:manage_printers, printing:manage_rules, printing:view_jobs, printing:retry_jobs and printing:cancel_jobs. Managers and branch managers have them all; kitchen staff can view jobs, print and reprint.