Food bank API

A script to iterate through Trussell Trust food banks and find out what items they need, and a simple web server to let people query this and find out what items are needed by nearby food banks.

Read this blog post on the background to this API

Getting Started

Start by installing the dependencies:

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml
pip install requests
pip install geopy
pip install web.py

For a fresh file of food bank information you should run:

python get_food_bank_details_and_write_to_file.py

That will create a new, current version of food_bank_data_storage.txt

That'll take a couple of hours, so you might prefer to just use the food_bank_data_storage.txt that comes in this repo when you're getting started. It'll become increasingly out-of-date, but you can use it to make sure you've set things up correctly.

Then run the server:

python server.py

API Endpoints

The API accepts GET requests. There are two endpoints, shown below with an example request.

http://127.0.0.1:8080/nearest-food-banks?lat=52.629958&long=1.298408&number=9999 http://127.0.0.1:8080/individual-food-bank-information?name=York%20Foodbank

Running the tests

There aren't any unit or integration tests yet. Pull requests will be reviewed!