I’ve made great progress on this work in the last couple of months. (Read part 1 of my project to create a foodbank API)

My goal was “Make an API that, for a given geolocation, returns the nearest 3 foodbanks, with a list of the items that they need.”

I’ve achieved this for something running locally (i.e. just on my computer, but not on a web server that anyone could access). You can download the code and follow the instructions to run it yourself, if you have the Python programming language installed on your computer. I actually went slightly further than planned – you can specify the number of foodbanks you want to see, and you can also find out the items needed by a given named foodbank.

The next step is to get it running online so that anyone can use it.

I’ve been testing the risky assumptions

  • If I know the URL of a given foodbank’s page on food donations, I can work out what items they need.
    Yes. I’ve written code to do this.
  • All Trussell Trust foodbanks follow the same way of organising their websites.
    Mostly. About 9% of them don’t follow the standard format.
  • All Trussell Trust foodbanks follow the same way of describing the items they need.
    As above.
  • I can access or somehow generate a comprehensive and accurate list of all Trussell Trust foodbanks.
    Yes. I stumbled across this in the HTML on the Trussell Trust’s Find a Food Bank page. I can get this list with a single GET request.
  • If I have a list of Trussell Trust foodbanks I can straightforwardly work out the URLs of their pages describing the items they need.
    Mostly, yes. I’ve written code to do this.
  • I can scrape the information I need from the relevant server/servers in a courteous way
    Not sure yet. I assume all of the Trussell Trust’s standard sites are hosted on a single web server. I make a single GET request to get the names and URLs of all the foodbanks, but each ‘items needed’ page is a separate request. I’ve included a pause between each request, but I don’t know if it’s too long or too short.
  • It won’t be very difficult to build a data representation of food banks and required items, or to store this in an appropriate database.
    This was quite straightforward. And I didn’t even need a database, as I’m going to hold all the information in memory and not manipulate it.
  • Building and running the API won’t be too much fuss. (Or, less concisely: It’s possible to build a lightweight, modern infrastructure to host a database for this API and serve requests without too much complexity or cost.)
    I’ve built an API that runs locally. Hosting it online as a real webserver should be reasonably straightforward. That’s the next step.
    I’ve found an entirely-renewably-powered web host, which might help me meet my extra goal of running this API entirely renewably.

Read part 1 of this project. See Part 3 to find out what I did next