Food Suggestions Bot

This is a Telegram chatbot that provides the user with a suggestion of food options from Singapore.

Try it out at @food_suggestion_bot. It might have a short lag time when initially starting the bot because it is running on the free tier of Heroku.

Main features are:

• Food suggestion from a database of local food
• Users can also add food into the database
• Option to log the suggested food, or log and add your own food

This is my personal project to experiment with the telegram bot API, using SQLalchemy with Postgresql and deploying to heroku using docker.

Database of food options are from the decomissioned @dontthinkjusteat. Many thanks to the creators, this is just my implementation of their idea with a few of my own tweaks.

Getting Started

To create a telegram bot, you first need to create one from the system by talking to the Telegram Bot called BotFather. Then you will get an API token, which you must put it into the environment variable TOKEN.

Antoher env variable MODE must be selected from 2 values: dev, and prod for the 2 ways of work: development (local) and production (heroku)

HEROKU_APP_NAME is the name of your application that you have created in Heroku. This is only used when deployed to heroku

Some codes are adapted from this page

Prerequisites

Docker

Installing

First make sure to install all the requirements using

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then you have to set the environment variables:

MODE=dev
TOKEN=<your TOKEN from botfather>

And run application.py

python application.py

Deployment to Fly

To deploy to fly, you can follow this page