MenuGen | An Intelligent Generator of Balanced meals

MenuGen is a school project that solves an eternal issue : What are we going to eat tonight?

To solve this issue, MenuGen asks you a few questions about your morphology, your food tastes and allergies or diets, before generating well-balanced meals for the next week!

How does it work?

First, we setup MenuGen:

Scrape recipes on the internet, storing the ingredients along with the steps to cook it
Match the ingredients to OpenFoodFacts to evaluate the nutritional value of each recipe
Store these in a PostGreSQL database and wait for users

Then, when you want to generate a meal:

Create an account, entering basic morphological informations that let us calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate
Match this calorie count to the WHO nutritional recommendations to derive your needs in proteins/carbs/fats
Run a Genetical Algorithm that will iterate on potential menus based on your tastes and diet to optimize the nutritional value of your meals
Display the result in a nice dashboard where you can remove dishes, reorder meals, print a shopping list, etc.

How do I use it?

For now there is no hosted instance of MenuGen. If you want to run it on your machine, follow these steps:

Configure the development environment

Python

Install the following packages: python3 python3-pip

Then run from the root of the project:

sudo pip install virtualenv
virtualenv -p python3 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

To disable the python virtual environment, run deactivate

Front-end

cd application

Install Bower + Grunt:

npm install -g grunt-cli bower

Install Assets:

npm install && bower install

Compile Assets:

grunt

Django

Initialize and configure the development database:

./manage.py makemigrations
./manage.py migrate

Create your super user:

./manage.py createsuperuser

Run the development server

First check if you're using the virtualenv. If not, run

source .venv/bin/activate

Then you can run the server with

./manage.py runserver

project root - http://127.0.0.1:8000
administration interface - http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin

Migrate your local database

When models are edited, you must compute the necessary migrations from your database state, then migrate with

./manage.py makemigrations
./manage.py migrate

Manage data in the database

Load initial data (so far the ingredients):

./manage.py loaddata initial_data

Note: initial_data is reloaded every migration

Create a fixture (snapshot from the data currently in the database):

./manage.py dumpdata > menus/fixtures/myfixture.json

Load a fixture:

./manage.py loaddata myfixture

Fill ingredients directly from the csv:

./manage.py fill_db

PLNech/MenuGen