Forkcast

Forkcast is a web application that digitizes and simplifies meal planning. Instead of juggling paper lists, it combines a drag-and-drop weekly calendar with a smart shopping list, recipe discovery, and a small social layer around friends.

Demo

Dashboard	Weekly Schedule	Shopping List

Discovery	Friends	Cooking

Features

Meal Planner & Calendar

• Interactive weekly calendar as the core of the app.
• Drag & drop recipes onto a weekday.
• Categorize each entry: breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a free-text label (e.g. "Snack").
• Portions scale ingredient amounts to the number of people.

Smart Shopping List

• Generated automatically from the weekly plan.
• Identical ingredients across recipes (e.g. onions) are merged and summed.
• Stock check: tick off or reduce quantities for items already at home.

Discovery & Social

• Home page acts as an inspiration feed with a daily highlight.
• Friend network: add friends by username, send/accept/decline requests.
• Privacy: each user chooses whether their weekly plan is public (visible to friends) or private.

Recipes & Personalization

• Spoonacular API as recipe data source, with detailed ingredients and nutrition.
• Search with filters; favorites and per-recipe ratings.
• Allergy / dietary filters applied to recommendations.
• 9 UI languages incl. right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew).

Architecture

Monorepo with two independently deployed apps:

Part	Stack	Deploy
frontend/	Nuxt 4 (Vue 3), Pinia, TailwindCSS 4 + DaisyUI, i18n	Static site → GitHub Pages
backend/	Express 5, better-sqlite3, JWT, Spoonacular	Docker image → GHCR

The frontend is a static SPA: it talks to the backend REST API at /api, holds the JWT in sessionStorage, and renders the dashboard client-side only. The backend owns auth, the SQLite database, recipe caching from Spoonacular, and email (verification / password reset).

sommerprojekt-wmc-forkcast/
├── frontend/   # Nuxt 4 client
├── backend/    # Express REST API + SQLite
├── .github/    # CI: Pages deploy, backend Docker build
└── erd.puml    # entity-relationship diagram source

Quick Start

Run the backend and frontend in two terminals.

# 1. Backend (REST API on :3000)
cd backend
cp example.env .env        # then fill in JWT_SECRET, SPOONACULAR_API_KEY, ...
npm install
npm start

# 2. Frontend (Nuxt dev server on :8080 — matches the backend's default CORS_ORIGIN)
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev -- --port 8080

The frontend reads the API base URL from API_BASE_URL (defaults to http://localhost:3000/api), so no override is needed with the backend on :3000.

See backend/README.md and frontend/README.md for details.

Deployment

• Frontend — .github/workflows/deploy-nuxt.yaml builds the static site (npm run generate) and publishes frontend/.output/public to GitHub Pages on every push to main. Base URL: /sommerprojekt-wmc-forkcast.
• Backend — .github/workflows/backend-docker.yml builds and pushes a Docker image to ghcr.io/<owner>/forkcast-backend on changes under backend/.

Team

Kerimcan Yagci, Lukas Grünzweil, Erik Reitbauer, Nico Haider

Color Palette

https://coolors.co/e8f1f2-b3efb2-7a9e7e-31493c-001a23

Database Entities

Core tables: User, Friend, FriendRequest, CalenderEntry, Recipe, RecipeDetails, RecipeIngredient, RecipeInstruction, RecipeRating, FavoriteFood, FilterGroup, Filter.