The USDA nutrition database is a great source of nutrition information. However, the data formatting options (plain text ASCII files or MS-Access) leave a little to be desired.
This is a simple gem to import the database into your ruby application.
Even after importing this data, keeping it up to date and adding/maintaining additional logic such as full text search, weight conversion, etc is a pain. As an alternative I have put together a small RESTful web service to do this for you. You can find the docs at http://docs.usdanutrientservice.apiary.io/
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'usda-nutrient-database'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install usda-nutrient-database
If you're using rails then copy the migrations across:
rake usda_nutrient_database_engine:install:migrations
Import the latest data with the import task:
rake usda:import
This is going to take a while. 60+ minutes on my 2.66 GHz i7 macbook pro. You ca also import individual tables using the other import tasks. To see the available tasks:
rake -T usda
Use the models to query and profit:
UsdaNutrientDatabase::FoodGroup
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Food
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Nutrient
UsdaNutrientDatabase::FoodsNutrient
UsdaNutrientDatabase::Weight
UsdaNutrientDatabase::SourceCode
If you find a bug then add it to the issues here on github. Ideally with a pull request to fix it, or at least with a failing test. When you report a bug, number 1 rule is: don't be a dick.
Any feature requests/ideas can also go in the issues list.
- Fork it
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create new Pull Request
Many thanks to the following contributers:
This gem follows Semantic Versioning