Vienna Lunch

This is a web app to show the daily lunch menus of a selection of restaurants in Vienna.

You can suggest a new restaurant by opening an issue. Or, if you have basic Ruby skills, open a pull request.

Its backend is a Ruby-on-Rails app that uses the restaurants’ Facebook feeds and websites to pull today’s lunch menu. The frontend is an AngularJS app that shows the menus in columns as well as on a Google map.

If you don’t happen to live in Vienna, you can just fork the repo and replace the restaurant files.

Contributing

To add a new restaurant just open a pull request.

Setup

• Make sure you have libxml2 and friends installed: brew install libxslt
• Clone the repo
• Set up Rails 4.1 and Ruby 2.1, e.g. rbenv install 2.1.3 && rbenv local 2.1.3 then run bundler install
• In the client/ directory run bower install.
• Start the rails server FB_APP_ID=your-app-id FB_APP_ID=your-client-secret rails s --env=production (if you leave out the --env it will use test menus from lib/vienna_lunch/support/restaurants.json, so you can leave it out if you just want to develop the UI)
• Start the JS build environment in client/ via gulp serve
• Point your browser to http://localhost:9000

Use of Facebook API

Facebook now requires all requests to the graph API to have a valid access token. If you want to add/maintain restaurants that publish their menu on their Facebook page, you need to get an App Access Token from https://developers.facebook.com/apps/. To run the app or the tests, you need to have FB_APP_ID and FB_CLIENT_SECRET set as environment variables.

Adding a restaurant

Restaurants publish the lunch menus in different ways, e.g., their Facebook page or their website. The data source for the restaurant should be reliable and consistent in its publication week after week. For a new restaurant, a Ruby script needs to be added. Depending on the data source, have a look at the existing scripts:

• Facebook page: Figar
• The restaurant’s website: Steman
• A PDF file linked on the restaurants’s website: CoteSud

The files have to be put in a certain place:

• The new restaurant script needs to be placed under lib/vienna_lunch/restaurants and then added to lib/vienna_lunch/restaurants.rb.
• A test file should be added under spec/restaurants. This can then be run with FB_APP_ID=your-app-id FB_APP_ID=your-client-secret rspec spec/restaurants/NAME_spec.rb.

In the user interface (client/) no change is needed.

Screen scraping API

• For Facebook pages, the page’s RSS feed is used. For that you need to look up the Facebook ID of the restaurant page and put that in the MENU_URL. This website can help you find the ID based on the page.
• For scraping the HTML of the restaurant’s website, just use Nokogiri
• For PDF menus, I included this wrapper as pdf_helper.rb which is based on pdf-reader.