menu

You're planning the meals for the next two weeks. You have a list of dishes to choose from, and a set of things you want to eat each week. How do you find a good solution that satisfies all the requirements? A good option is using Constraint satisfaction problem, or CSP.

The list of meals should be in dish_list.csv, with headers name,tag where tag is the main "component" of that meal, e.g. "chicken", "fish", "vegetarian"... There's a template in dish_list_template.csv.

The CSP solver code is in menu.py. You can (optionally) run it with python menu.py to see a possible solution (meal order is randomized so that it changes every time the schedule is re-generated).

Finally, backend.py serves 2 endpoints:

• /menu returns the current menu, saved in the session (persists while the server is running but not after)
• /generate calls generate_schedule to re-generate a new meal plan.

These endpoints are used in the web UI (index.html) to display the current schedule and to generate a new one on demand.

Warning

I programmed the CSP so that both Saturday lunches are free, and Saturday dinners are egg-based. The former is in line 36 (if not (day == "Saturday" and time == "Lunch")), and the latter is in the 8th restriction in menu.py, feel free to remove those if they don't suit your needs.

TLDR

1. Create dish_list.csv and populate with some meals, ideally 26 of them (14 days, lunch+dinner, minus Saturday lunch—see warning above).
2. Make sure you're using Python 3.11 (why?), (optionally) create a Conda env with conda create -n myenv python=3.11.
3. pip install flask flask_cors ortools (no requirements.txt sorry)
4. Run python backend.py
5. On another window, run python -m http.server and open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.