We wanted to create a project that would help us in our everyday lives since we have been tired of not knowing what we wanted to eat for our next meal, and we want to stay healthy and not eat out at restaurants often. A lot of thought goes into planning out a week's worth of meals while simultaneously trying to balance your macronutrient intake, so we created this app to streamline and automate this process for our own personal use.
OptiMeal generates 21 unique meals for a week by pulling from a browsable recipe database with filters for dietary restrictions, cuisines, and macronutrient targets. Users can view each recipe to learn more about macros, the ingredients used to make it (in order to compile a shopping list), and the steps to making it.
We built it using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) and the Spoonacular API to pull ingredients, recipes, and pricing data. We used Axios for the front-end API, Express.js for the back-end, and Nginx as a web server to help us deploy our website on an AWS instance.
URL: https://ec2-3-137-202-160.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com/
Technologies Used
- React: Front-end development
- Express: Server-side development
- MongoDB/Mongoose: Database management
- Spoonacular: API used for recipe data
- Node.js: JavaScript runtime environment
- Nginx: Web server software
