Tufts Dining API

I built a Heroku-hosted RESTful API that tranformed menu information scraped from Tufts Dining into JSON. Using Flask and MongoDB, I built the site for fast and easy retrieval of Tufts menu data.

Mongo acts as a cache for dining data, storing all of the menus that have previously been accessed.

Why did I do this in the first place? For my web programming class, my group is building a dining hall comparison application. Given a certain point in time, I want to be able to retrieve the menu, look at all of the items in the menu, and compile a cumulative score for the dining hall. Furthermore, the theme of this semester’s group projects is food, so I expect many groups to want to use the API instead of directly scraping the menu from the Tufts Dining website.

You can check out the code on Github, or check out the actual API. Thanks to Serafeim Papastefanos for an awesome tutorial on building a REST API on Heroku.

Status: Complete. I want to add scraping for nutrition information and ingredients, but this will prove to be more difficult, because the URL’s for these pages are not obvious. We’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, I’ll be building DiningDuel.

Update: I have added ingredients information to the API through a brute-force search of all the possible food item pages.