timwangmusic / vacation-planner

Vacation Planner is a service for travelers to find enjoyable routes under budget and time constraints

Unwind

• Website: www.unwind.dev

Motivation

Travel planning is vital for a great vacation, but it can be a tedious and frustrating process. Sifting through maps and countless online resources is not only time-consuming but often yields less-than-ideal results. Juggling time and budget constraints adds another layer of complexity. Our goal is to streamline this process, empowering travelers to create unforgettable vacations that fit their budgets and schedules. Our planning APIs simplify the experience by allowing users to input their desired destination, date, and time preferences. The service then generates customized travel plans tailored to their needs. While the initial version focuses on single-day trips and generic rankings, future iterations will incorporate personalized recommendations.

Features

• Save your favorite plans in your profile
• View trip details
• Make a plan yourself by creating a template

Installation (Mac)

• git clone the repository
• update Homebrew with brew update
• Install Redis using Homebrew with brew install redis
  • If Redis is already installed, execute brew upgrade redis

Development

• Obtain Google Maps API key and set the MAPS_CLIENT_API_KEY=YOUR_GCP_API_KEY, REDISCLOUD_URL=redis://localhost:6379 environment variables.
• Set environment variable ENVIRONMENT=DEVELOPMENT,SENDGRID_API_KEY=NO_KEY as we do not create mailers in development environment.
• Start (in background) Redis service with brew services start redis.
• Execute go run main/main.go to start the server.

Running with Docker Compose

• Use command docker-compose up -d to start the containers.
• Make sure to set up environment variables REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379 and MAPS_CLIENT_API_KEY=YOUR_GCP_API_KEY. Note that using localhost for redis URL does not work.
• To stop the containers, use the command docker-compose stop.

Production Deployment

• The service can be deployed on any service platform. Particularly we have configured the code base and been deploying the service to Heroku.
• For deployment to Heroku, simply execute git push heroku master.

Future Development Plans

• Multi-city, multi-day planning

System Integration and External Services

• Redis
• Google Maps API
• GeoNames Web Services

Tech Stack

• Backend: Golang
• Frontend: Bootstrap and Javascript

Star History

vacation-planner's Issues

Refine places selection, filter places based on price range or certain number of stars, etc.

Error: No available formula with the name "mongodb"

The way mongodB is being installed in the README file may not work anymore

MacBook-Pro:Vacation-Planner sandeepanand$ brew install mongodb Error: No available formula with the name "mongodb"

The installation works as a tap now,
https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-os-x/

Price selection mismatch in front-end

Starting from 8831b78, the price selection from home page seems to have an offset of 1 compared to the search results from backend.

Handle Invalid TravelDate from plan URL

In PR #213, TravelDate is enabled as a part of the URL parameter.
Currently there is no logic to handle if an invalid plan show page URL with fake travel date.

Protect APIs against security vulnerabilities

Some of our APIs lack sanitization and input validations, these can lead to security vulnerabilities such as cross site scripting attacks.

Add category tags for the automatic planning HTML result

Remove orphan plans in Redis

When a new set of travel plans are generated, they can be found only through a parent Redis key, which expires in 24 hours (by current config). After the parent key expires, the plans cannot be referenced easily unless through saved plans list in the user profile. When users delete the references, they are likely to accumulate in the database. This is a flaw of the original design.

Place photo missing on the plan detail page

figure out the reason why a few places may have broken photo on the plan detail page.

Allow users to like or dislike a plan

Add a thumb up and thumb down button besides each plan so that the server should remove the plan from next rendering for that user.

To support this feature, we have to increase the number of plans generated from the initial request. The reason is otherwise we have to keep generating new plans, which will bog down the server.

Back button does not work in some browser

Back button does not work in the mobile version on some browser.

Missing and broken location photos in trip show page

Description:

For the trip result show page merged to master from 96179ae, there are some trip plan show page with missing place photo.

Link: https://www.unwind.dev/v1/plans/34166aa9-ac7b-4505-b750-d5c93d9b975f?

Things to debug:

• study the cause of this missing picture issue, initial assessment it is due to invalid location info stored in Redis
• work out a fix pending on the determination of the issue

[Pricing] Handle Free option for Pricing where we may likely see results which are not actually Free

For the case of free Choice, mostly chosen, a user may see results in the responses where there are rows in a plan, where there the plan has selections which are not free .

Especially it's tough to get free options for eateries or Clubs

Incorrect sequence of locations in trip plan show page

Description:

For the new PR merged to master in 96179ae and service endpoint /plans/:id, there are some trip plans with incorrect sequences of locations.
For example, the restaurant location can be shown in the last instead of middle.

Things to debug

• check original solutions and trip plans stored in Redis, and see if the location and place ID mapping is correct
• check processing of new endpoint handler getTripDetails(), if any processing may have swapped the order of locations

Allow users to enter name of a POI and plan the rest of the day

Often times we start planning a day trip with one Point of Interest (POI) in mind. For instance, we are in New York City and want to visit the Empire state building. But we don't know what are the nearby POI to go that can fill in the day. Vacation planner should be able to fill the plan for the rest of the day for users.