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Menus des cantines smart home integration, free and open source

Menus des cantines integration for Gladys Assistant

School canteen menus of French cities (open data): Toulouse, Rennes, Nantes Métropole.

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The school canteen menu of your city in Gladys: today's starter, main course, side dish, dairy and dessert, the mentions the city gives (vegetarian, organic, local…), a dashboard widget with today and tomorrow, a scene action that reads the menu out, and triggers for a vegetarian day or a dish you watch for ("frites!").

The menus come from the open data portals of the cities: no account, no key. This integration is not affiliated with the cities or their caterers.

What you get​

  • One device per menu the city publishes: Toulouse (nursery school, primary school), Rennes (the three sectors of the central kitchen), Nantes Métropole (one menu per town and menu type: standard, nursery, primary, alternative…).
  • Text features with today's meal, updated a few minutes after midnight.
  • A dashboard widget with today's and tomorrow's meals.
  • A scene action "Get the canteen menu" and two scene triggers.

Requirements​

  • Gladys Assistant 5.3.0 or later.
  • Internet access from the Gladys host (the portals are on the internet).
  • A school among the cities supported (see Limitations for the others).

Installation​

  1. In Gladys, open Integrations → Install from GitHub.
  2. Paste https://github.com/guim31/gladys-cantines and install.
  3. Open the integration's Configuration tab.

Configuration​

Settings​

  • Cities: tick the city of your school. Rennes splits its schools into three sectors: the city's website tells which one is yours.
  • Watched words: words to look for in the dishes, separated by commas (frites, pizza, poisson: the dishes are in French), for the "Watched dish on the menu" trigger. Accents and case do not matter; a word matches the start of a word (frite finds "Frites au four", riz does not find "Chorizo").
  • Refresh: how often the portals are read (every 3, 6 or 12 hours). The menus are published weeks ahead: 6 hours is plenty.
  • Language of names and messages: the language of the feature names, the states and the scene sentences. Feature names are fixed when a device is added.

Adding menus​

Save the configuration: the menus of the ticked cities appear in the Discover tab. Add yours to Gladys, rename it as you like ("Léa's school"): the widget and the scene sentences use that name.

Checking​

The Status action of the Configuration tab lists, per city, the menus found, the time of the last reading, the last day published and the last error.

Devices​

Every feature is a read-only text holding today's value:

FeatureContent
Starter, Main course, Side dish, Dairy, DessertToulouse and Rennes: the dish, two choices joined by "or"
Today's menuNantes Métropole: the whole meal as the town wrote it
Mentionsvegetarian, organic, sustainable, local, French meat, and the city's comment of the day ("Semaine du goût")

A course that is not served shows "—". A day without a meal shows No meal today (week-end, holidays, public holiday: the cities do not say which), or Menu not published yet after the last day the city published. Dish names stay as the cities write them, in French.

Dashboard widget​

Canteen menus: one row per menu and day (today, tomorrow), with the main course and a "Veggie" badge on a vegetarian day. Tap a row for the whole meal and its mentions. Settings: the menus shown (empty: all of them, four with tomorrow, eight without), show tomorrow, show the mentions.

Scene triggers​

  • Vegetarian menu: a watched menu is vegetarian, today (fired between 7:00 and 10:00) or tomorrow (between 18:00 and 21:00). Only when the city says so: Toulouse (main courses coded "plat sans viande" only: a fish or egg day is not flagged), Rennes (code, comment or a single main course named so), and the towns of Nantes Métropole that start the text with "Menu végétarien".
  • Watched dish on the menu: a dish contains one of the watched words, same windows. The optional Word filter compares exactly: write it in lower case, as in the configuration.

Both pass on the menu name, the date and the whole meal; the second also the word and the dish found. Each event fires once per menu, day and word, even if the integration restarts in the window.

Scene action​

Get the canteen menu answers with a sentence ready for a message or a speaker: "Léa's school, tomorrow: Carottes râpées, Poulet rôti, Frites, Yaourt, Pomme." Fields: the menu (empty: every watched menu) and the day (empty: today). Outputs: the sentence, has_menu (1 when a meal is served) and vegetarian (1 when every meal served is vegetarian), for a "Continue only if" step.

Scene examples​

  • At 19:00 on school days: "Get the canteen menu" for tomorrow, then send the sentence to the family.
  • "Watched dish on the menu", day tomorrow, word frites: a message to the children's tablet.
  • "Vegetarian menu", day today: plan a meat dinner.

Data and refresh​

CityPortalLicencePublished
Toulousedata.toulouse-metropole.fr, "Menus des cantines – automatisés"Licence Ouverte 2.0about three weeks ahead, updated daily
Rennesdata.rennesmetropole.fr, "Menus des cantines des écoles"ODbLseveral weeks ahead
Nantes Métropoledata.nantesmetropole.fr, "Menus des cantines scolaires à Nantes Métropole"Licence Ouvertefrom one to eight weeks ahead, depending on the town

One request per city at each refresh, for the days from two weeks back to five weeks ahead. Today's states are recomputed every 10 minutes, so the new day shows within ten minutes of midnight (Paris time).

Troubleshooting​

  • My menu is not in the Discover tab: tick its city and save; a town of Nantes Métropole that published nothing for weeks is not listed.
  • "Menu not published yet": the city has not published that day yet; the Status action shows the last day published.
  • A trigger does not fire: check the time windows, the word filter in lower case, and that the menu is added to Gladys.
  • Logs: docker logs of the integration container, LOG_LEVEL=debug for each reading.

Limitations​

  • Three cities so far. Others publish menus as PDF files or not at all; a city with an open data API can be added: open an issue.
  • No allergens: none of these portals publishes them per day.
  • The vegetarian mention is only as good as what the city publishes.
  • Developed without access to a school: feedback welcome.

Credits​

Data: Mairie de Toulouse (Licence Ouverte 2.0), Ville de Rennes / Rennes Métropole (ODbL), Ville de Nantes and the towns of Nantes Métropole (Licence Ouverte). Integration by guim31, Apache 2.0.

Configuration settings​

These are the settings Menus des cantines asks for in its configuration screen in Gladys.

SettingTypeRequiredDescription
How it workssectionNoTick your city and save: its menus appear in the Discover tab. Add yours to Gladys. No account, no key.
Citiesmulti_selectNoCities that publish their canteen menus in open data. Others: see the guide.
Watched wordsstringNoComma-separated, for the "Watched dish on the menu" trigger.
RefreshselectNo
Language of names and messagesselectNoFeature names are fixed when a device is added.

How to install Menus des cantines in Gladys​

  1. In Gladys, open Integrations: Menus des cantines appears in the catalog, next to the native integrations, with a community badge.
  2. Click Install. Gladys pulls the Docker image (ghcr.io/guim31/gladys-cantines:1.0.0), starts it in a sandbox isolated from the core, and generates the integration's interface (devices, discovery and configuration).
  3. Open the Configuration screen of the integration, fill in the settings, and save.
  4. You can also install it directly from its repository URL: https://github.com/guim31/gladys-cantines.

Menus des cantines requires Gladys >=5.3.0. The catalog inside Gladys refreshes every hour, so a new version becomes available at most one hour after its release.

Not running Gladys yet? It is free and open source: follow the installation guide to get started.

About external integrations​

Menus des cantines is an external integration: a community integration packaged as a Docker container and published on GitHub, that Gladys installs in one click and runs in a sandbox isolated from its core. It is published and maintained by guim31, not by the Gladys core team.

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