It's a python recommendation engine wrapped in flask, so it could be easily used as a microservice (proper Nginx-like server/containerization is needed, though).

Recommender's model is based on MovieLens data with 10,448 movies and 27,225,144 recommendations (movies with 100+ ratings). One can get predictions based on a title or id. The first option is useful for model QA purposes while the second could be used for production.

How to run the server

Run these two commands:

1. source venv/bin/activate
2. flask run

The server will be up and running and available at http://localhost:5000/. One can check short API endpoints manual below

Endpoints

/make_recommendations_by_id

The endpoint can serve POST and GET requests and awaits for object_id. Such id-based recommendations could be used in a production environment, for making title-based recommendations check the endpoints described below.

The endpoint can be used as follows:

• curl -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_id' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"object_id":"1"}'
• http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_id?object_id=1

One can find ids for each title in datasets/movies.csv.

/make_recommendations_by_title

The endpoint can serve POST and GET requests. title argument needs to be passed with GET request or as a body of a POST request. Title-based recommendations are great for testing the quality of model's predictions. However, when you pass a title to this endpoint, it will search for similar titles and select the first one. So if one wants to get predictions for some particular title, consider using make_recommendations_by_id endpoint.

This endpoint can be used as follows:

• http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_title?title=Big Lebo
• http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_title?title=Matrix
• curl -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_title' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"title":"Big Lebo"}'
• curl -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/make_recommendations_by_title' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"title":"Matrix"}'

/recommender

Basically it's a human-friendly html version of make_recommendations_by_title endpoint. It is accessible at http://127.0.0.1:5000/recommender

Prerequisites (usage without venv)

One should install python and pip before running the server

Altogether one should run:

1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get install python3.6
3. sudo apt install python3-pip

One needs to setup a proper server instead of running flask server for production purposes.