🥘 🥣 InstaRecipe -- 12.000 recipes served instantly

InstaRecipe is a Flask webapplication that serves 12.000 recipes instantly, it gets it's recipes from the breakfast API and based on the name of the recipe it fetches an image using RapidAPI .

Check out the demo: http://instarecipe.nl or this link to the container on Lightsail

How it works:

• The premise is that you'll get a recipe, instantly. Only 1 at a time to make things simple in this rather complicated world
• Upon startup InstaRecipe will store 1 recipe in memory this one will be served first to someone visiting the app
• This user can then pick either 2 things: 1 to get a new Recipe or 2 to store the current recipe in his or her favourites
• If you opt for a new recipe then a new recipe will be loaded
• If you opt to store as a favourite, then you can hop over to your favourites tab and check out the recipes you have saved
• That's about it :D

Installation:

• You can easily download the project and run locally
• Simply add a keys_config.cfg file to the folder
• and add you rapidAPI keys use this template

[RapidAPI]
api_key = PASTE YOUR API KEY HERE

• However I also made a Docker Image to make things even more simple to run, just pull the image and run the app.

To download the docker image:

docker pull petervandoorn/insta-recipe

To run the container on port 80 (The flask app serves on port 5000)

docker container run -p 80:5000 [insta-recipe]

Why such a fuss for such a simple app?

If you're reading this you probably have much more experience developing software than I do. To be frank: It took me more than a week to build this app, spending many late hours googling the most basic questions on stackoverflow. Anyway: I'm genuinly very proud as it's the first time I built something with so many moving parts. For now it will serve as a portfolio project as it's currently the pinacle of my softwaredevelopment skillset, using all kinds of technology I was unfamiliar with. Lastly I'm writing this up as a memento to myself and other aspiring developers that if you really sit down and do the work, you can learn and achieve more than you ever expected.

Goal for the project

• Build a webapp with a backend -- I used flask for the very first time
• Do some kind of session related logic -- In my case I ended up storing favourites in the session
• Use an API and learn how to send data to the frontend -- Breakfast API was very convenient as it did not deal with authentication and returns very straight forward fields.
• Use a frontend framework -- In this case Bootstrap
• Wrap the whole app in a docker container for easy distribution
• Use AWS for hosting -- I developed using an EC2 instance and later I used Lightsail to host the docker image.

Known issues or things that I did not get to work yet:

• Setting a javascript spinner in the button on getting a new Recipe
• Storing the current recipe in the session -- these are now used system wide, causing some glitches if multiple users use the site at the same time
• Damn DNS on Lightsail -- will try to figure that one out over the weekend.
• CI/CD Pipeline