🍳 Recipes Portal

A web application for browsing and discovering recipes. Built as a team project for COMPSCI 235 (Software Development Methodologies).

NOTE: The .env file is included in this repository for educational purposes to demonstrate configuration practices. Since this is a classroom project running on localhost with no production deployment, the credentials are non-sensitive placeholders.

🎥 Demo Videos

recipes_homepage_demo.mov

recipes_browse_demo.mov

recipes_logged_in_demo.mov

About This Project

Recipes Portal is a web application built with Flask, HTML (with Jinja2), and CSS. It provides an interactive interface for exploring recipes with nutritional insights. The application features a robust domain model with comprehensive unit tests and a clean web interface that displays recipe information, including a custom health star rating system.

Key Features

• Recipe Browsing: Browse and explore recipes with paginated search functionality
• Filtered Search: Filter recipes by name, author, or category
• Save Favorites: Log in or register to save your favorite recipes for quick access
• Recipe Reviews: Read user reviews and ratings for recipes, and log in or register to post your own review (1-5 stars)
• Detailed Recipe Information: View complete recipe information including images, ingredients, instructions, and nutrition values
• Health Star Ratings: 0–5 health star ratings for each recipe (see Health Star Rating Formula for details)
• Automated Testing: Comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end testing
• Extensible Domain Model: Well-structured, object-oriented design with support for recipes, users, reviews, favorites, and more
• Flexible Data Storage: Works with both an in-memory storage layer and a local SQLite database

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+
• pip

Installation

Setup Steps

Windows

$ cd <project directory>
$ py -3 -m venv venv
$ venv\Scripts\activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

macOS/Linux

$ cd <project directory>
$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Data Storage

This application supports two data storage backends:

• Memory Repository: All data is stored in memory during runtime. Useful for testing and development.
• SQLite Database: Data is persisted in a local SQLite database. When you run flask run, the database will be automatically populated with recipe data on first run.

Execution

Running the application

From the project directory, and within the activated virtual environment (see venv\Scripts\activate above):

$ flask run

Testing

From a terminal in the root folder of the project (within the activated virtual environment), run the tests with:

$ python -m pytest -v tests

This will run all unit tests with verbose output, showing detailed information about each test.

Configuration

The project directory/.env file contains variable settings. They are set with appropriate values.

• FLASK_APP: Entry point of the application (wsgi.py).
• FLASK_ENV: The environment in which to run the application (either development or production).
• SECRET_KEY: Secret key used to encrypt session data.
• TESTING: Set to False for running the application. Overridden and set to True automatically when testing the application.
• WTF_CSRF_SECRET_KEY: Secret key used by the WTForms library.

Data sources

The data files are modified excerpts downloaded from:

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/irkaal/foodcom-recipes-and-reviews/

Health Star Rating Formula

Each recipe in this application is given a Health Star Rating (0–5 stars) based on its per-serving nutritional values.
The formula is designed to reward nutrients that are generally considered beneficial, while penalizing those that are linked to less healthy outcomes when consumed in excess.

• Starting point: Every recipe begins with a baseline of 5 stars.
• Deductions (penalties):
  • Saturated fat: -0.5 stars per 5g
  • Sugar: -0.3 stars per 10g
  • Sodium: -0.5 stars per 1000mg
• Additions (bonuses):
  • Fiber: +0.4 stars per 5g
  • Protein: +0.3 stars per 10g

Final rating:
The result is rounded to one decimal place and clamped between 0 and 5 stars.

If a recipe is missing key nutrition data (calories, sugar, saturated fat, sodium, fiber, or protein), the health star rating is shown as: “Health star rating unavailable”.