Populartimes API

📝 Table of Contents

• About
• Getting Started
• Deployment
• Contributors

🧐 About

A small HTTP server around m-wrzru/populartimes to access Google Maps popular times data from the Google Maps SDK - which it does not provide by default 😕. It is designed to run as a serverless function, so hosting a scalable version is trivial!

🎈 Usage

These instructions will get you started using the API. See deployment for notes on how to deploy your own version.

Prerequisites

Get a Google Maps SDK key here.

Using the API

Throughout these instructions we will use https://populartimes.now.sh/api/. This version does not have a Google Maps SDK configured, as such we need to set it using the api_key query variable. If you decide to host your own version, then you can also pass this as an environment variable, which will remove the need to set it on every request.

The API is simple, there's one endpoint /api/ which takes two query variables:

• place_id: A place ID you have received from another call to the Google Maps API.
• api_key (optional): The Google Maps SDK key want to use. When left empty it is assumed that it's passed as an environment variable in the deployed instance.

Example

Curl

export PLACE_ID=ChIJSYuuSx9awokRyrrOFTGg0GY # The Place ID you want to query
export API_KEY=... # add your Google Maps API key here
curl 'https://populartimes.now.sh/api/\?place_id\=$PLACE_ID\&api_key\=$API_KEY'

Browser

Go to https://populartimes.now.sh/api/?place_id=ChIJSYuuSx9awokRyrrOFTGg0GY&api_key=YOUR_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY and replace YOUR_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY with your Google Maps API Key.

The resulting JSON will look something like - note this is formatted for readability. See https://github.com/m-wrzr/populartimes#populartimesget_id for more details on the format of the response.

Note: Responses might not contain some fields, including populartimes and time_wait if they are not available for the queried place.

{
  "address": "22 Warren St, New York, NY 10007, USA",
  "coordinates": { "lat": 40.71431500000001, "lng": -74.007766 },
  "id": "ChIJSYuuSx9awokRyrrOFTGg0GY",
  "international_phone_number": "+1 212-577-2725",
  "name": "Gran Morsi",
  "populartimes": [
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 16, 37, 63, 77, 66, 41, 18, 0], "name": "Monday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 28, 52, 78, 93, 90, 69, 43, 0], "name": "Tuesday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 31, 46, 59, 61, 53, 38, 22, 0], "name": "Wednesday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 20, 43, 71, 92, 93, 75, 46, 0], "name": "Thursday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 31, 46, 72, 95, 100, 84, 58, 0], "name": "Friday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 33, 54, 82, 100, 91, 62, 0], "name": "Saturday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 29, 32, 37, 35, 25, 11, 0], "name": "Sunday" }
  ],
  "rating": 4.4,
  "rating_n": 346,
  "time_spent": [90, 180],
  "time_wait": [
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Monday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Tuesday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Wednesday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Thursday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Friday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 15, 15, 15, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Saturday" },
    { "data": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "name": "Sunday" }
  ],
  "types": ["restaurant", "food", "point_of_interest", "establishment"]
}

🚀 Deployment

Vercel

To deploy your own version of the application run:

now

Set API Key

If you want to set a default Google Maps API Key, then you need to configure Vercel to use the GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY environment variable. It is recommended to use secrets, which can be achieved as such:

# Create now.json
cp now.template.json now.json

# Only needs to be done once per project
now secrets add google-maps-api-key "MY_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY"

Now you can deploy as normal and have the Google Maps API key be pre-provisioned. Users can still set the api_key on individual requests, which will overwrite the value you configured globally.

✨ Contributors

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Adriaan Knapen 💻 🚧 🚇 📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!