MensaMax-API

Scraper for MensaMax products (like mensadigital.de/ mensamax.de/ mensapoint.de)

🍲🥘🥡🍛🍜🦐🥔
🍴🍽️ this is just a fancy way of getting some food 🍽️🍴
🍲🥘🥡🍛🍜🦐🥔

🧐 Usage

General Note: Please use your own caching strategy, MensaMax servers might be quite slow

API usage

see https://mensa.vercel.app/institutions-ui for API URLs

npm package usage

Install package

pnpm i @philippdormann/mensamax-api

ts/ module imports

import { fetchHTML, parser } from '@philippdormann/mensamax-api';
const html = await fetchHTML({ p: 'FO111', e: 'herz', kw: 15 });
const parsed = await parser(html);
console.log(parsed);

CommonJS imports

const { fetchHTML, parser } = require('@philippdormann/mensamax-api');
(async function () {
	try {
		const html = await fetchHTML({ p: 'FO111', e: 'herz', kw: 15 });
		const parsed = await parser(html);
		console.log(parsed);
	} catch (e) {
		console.log(e);
	}
})();

🚀 Deployment

This project is deployed as a serverless function on the url https://mensa.vercel.app with Vercel ☁️

🐳 Docker Deployment

This project can be deployed as a docker container. To do so, just run this code:

docker-compose up -d --build

💻 Local Development

Either develop on your machine directly or use the provided devcontainer for VSCode

pnpm i
pnpm dev

💡 How this works

1. Fetch data from url (fetcher.js)
   • fetch VIEWSTATE + VIEWSTATEGENERATOR from .NET with axios
     • hit login endpoint with a GET request
     • request method: POST
     • enable followAllRedirects
     • set login headers
   • setup request (these settings are important)
     • enable cookies
     • request method: POST
     • enable followAllRedirects
     • set login headers
2. Parsing the data (parser.js)
   • get relevant elements with cheerio
     • timePeriod
     • categories
     • day cards with food items
   • minify html
   • Regex
   • Replace unreadable markup such as internal MensaMax IDs
   • Build JSON from custom markup
3. Serve via rayo http/ Vercel Serverless Function

🏫 Known/ tested institutions

• For a nice GUI version, see https://mensa.vercel.app/institutions-ui
• For the raw data, see institutions.json
• Please feel free to suggest new institutions by opening a PR/ Issue

🧠 General Knowledge

• For some reason, MensaMax IT department decided to have many URLs
  • you can find a list of all known MensaMax URLS @mensamax-urls.txt
• These URLs are not interchangeable and seem to be different MensaMax versions (as of 13.04.2023)
• There is a private/ internal GraphQL API for MensaMax which needs authentication

👍💰 Support this project

You like this project and would like to give something back? Thanks! Have a look at my profile for more information & options.