Recipe Parser

The Recipe Parser converts recipe web pages or HTML files into a cookbook-ready format. It downloads the recipe, normalises its data, and saves the result (including the image) into a structured directory.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.11 or later
• git installed
• Internet access for downloading recipe pages

Installation

Ubuntu / macOS

# clone the repository
 git clone <repo-url>
 cd RecipeParser

# create and activate a virtual environment
 python3 -m venv venv
 source venv/bin/activate

# install dependencies
 pip install -r requirements.txt

Windows

REM clone the repository
git clone <repo-url>
cd RecipeParser

REM create and activate a virtual environment
py -3 -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate

REM install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Finding the right network interface

The parser can bind outgoing requests to a specific network interface. If no interface is provided, it uses 127.0.0.1 by default. Use one of the following commands to discover available interfaces:

• Ubuntu: ip -o link show
• macOS: networksetup -listallhardwareports
• Windows (PowerShell): Get-NetAdapter

Choose the interface name from the output (e.g. eth0, en0, Wi-Fi) and provide it with the --interface option.

Usage

Run the parser via web_to_cookbook.py. The most common options are shown below.

python web_to_cookbook.py [options]

Option	Description
-i, --interface	Network interface to use. Defaults to 127.0.0.1 if omitted.
-u, --url	Recipe URL to scrape. Can be repeated.
-f, --file	File containing recipe URLs or a local HTML file. Can be repeated.
-t, --target	Output folder for parsed recipes. Defaults to parsed_recipes.

Examples

Parse a single recipe from a URL:

python web_to_cookbook.py -u "https://example.com/recipe"

Parse multiple recipes and save them into my_recipes:

python web_to_cookbook.py -u url1 -u url2 -t my_recipes

Parse URLs listed in a file and bind to a specific interface:

python web_to_cookbook.py -f urls.txt -i eth0

On Windows, replace python with py if needed and quote interface names that include spaces:

py web_to_cookbook.py -u https://example.com -i "Wi-Fi"

The script creates a subdirectory for each recipe inside the target folder containing recipe.json and full.jpg.

Background folder watcher

You can process recipes automatically by watching a directory for new files. Each file should either contain a single URL or a block of HTML. New files are parsed and passed to web_to_cookbook.py automatically.

Run directly

python watch_folder.py /path/to/incoming /path/to/parsed_recipes

Using systemd (Linux)

Create /etc/systemd/system/recipe-watcher.service:

[Unit]
Description=Watch a folder and parse recipes

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/path/to/watch_folder.sh /path/to/incoming /path/to/parsed_recipes
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now recipe-watcher.service

On Windows or macOS you can run watch_folder.py using a similar startup mechanism such as Task Scheduler or launchd.

Running tests

To ensure the project works correctly after changes, run:

pytest