Mensa Rating System

Rate and review meals at Göttingen university mensas (Zentralmensa, CGiN, Mensa am Turm, Bistro HAWK).

Features

• Browse menus for the next 7 days across 4 mensas
• Optional accounts (username + password) — see your own ratings and favourites
• Rate dishes with 1–5 star ratings (works signed in or anonymously)
• Submit comments and upload photos (JPG/PNG/WebP, max 5MB)
• Rate side dishes individually
• Multilingual support (German/English)
• Search across all dishes
• View rating breakdowns (recent vs overall)
• Side dish rating averages

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	React 18 / i18next
Backend	FastAPI (Python 3.11)
Database	PostgreSQL 15
Web Server	Nginx (reverse proxy + static)
Containerization	Docker Compose

Quick Start

# Configure environment
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your DATABASE_URL and REACT_APP_API_URL

# Build and start
docker compose down && docker compose up -d --build

# Wait ~5–10s for database health check
# Access at http://localhost

Project Structure

rate-site/
├── docker-compose.yml        # Services orchestration
├── .env.example             # Environment template
├── nginx-proxy.conf         # Host nginx reverse proxy
├── backend/
│   ├── main.py              # API endpoints
│   ├── database.py          # SQLAlchemy models
│   ├── scraper.py           # Menu scraper
│   └── tests/               # Test suite
└── frontend/
    └── src/                 # React application

API Endpoints (/api/v1/)

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/mensas	List of mensa names
GET	/meals	Meals for date (`lang=de
GET	/meals/search	Search dishes
GET	/meals/{id}/ratings	All ratings for a dish
GET	/meals/{id}/ratings-breakdown	Rating breakdown with comments
GET	/meals/{id}/side-ratings	Side dish averages
GET	/meals/{id}/photos	Photos for a meal
POST	/meals/{id}/ratings	Create rating
POST	/meals/{id}/ratings-with-photo	Rating with photo
POST	/meals/{id}/side-ratings	Rate side dish

Development

Never run pytest inside the backend container — the suite drops and recreates tables against whatever DATABASE_URL is in scope, which there is production. Use the isolated test stack below.

# Run backend lint
docker compose exec backend python -m ruff check .

# Run the test suite (own compose project + throwaway Postgres on tmpfs)
docker compose -p rate-site-test -f docker-compose.test.yml run --rm tests

# Run DB integration tests
docker compose -p rate-site-test -f docker-compose.test.yml run --rm tests \
    python -m pytest tests/test_db_integrity.py -v

# Deploy to prod (backs up first)
./ops/pre-deploy.sh

# Start/refresh the dev instance on port 8080
./ops/dev-up.sh

# Manual menu scrape
docker compose exec backend python -c "from scraper import scrape_menus; scrape_menus()"

Backups

Nightly pg_dump + uploads tarball to /home/cloud/backups via cron (ops/backup.sh), 14 dailies and 8 weekly copies, with a row-count tripwire that alarms if a table suddenly empties. Restore with ops/restore.sh. All ops/ scripts default to prod; RATE_ENV=dev switches environment. See the Backups section in AGENTS.md.

Host health

The VM hard-locked twice (2026-08-31, 2026-09-01). Swap, earlyoom, a capped frontend build and an fsync'ing memory sampler are now in place; see "Host memory" and "Crash forensics" in AGENTS.md.

cat /var/log/rate-site/STATUS      # was the last boot clean? disk? swap?
./ops/check-host.sh                # disk / swap / guards / API readiness
./ops/dev-down.sh                  # stop dev to free memory before a big build

Dev vs prod

Prod is compose project rate-site on port 80; dev is rate-site-dev on 8080. They share no database, no uploads directory and no proxy config, and docker-compose.dev.yml pins its own project name: so the dev override cannot be applied to prod by accident. See "How dev and prod are kept apart" in AGENTS.md.

Configuration

Environment variables (.env):

• DATABASE_URL — PostgreSQL connection string
• REACT_APP_API_URL — Backend API base. Empty behind the reverse proxy (same-origin); http://localhost:8000 only for a bare npm start

Build-time (frontend):

• REACT_APP_API_URL set in frontend/Dockerfile as a build arg (empty in the deployed stacks)

License

MIT