GrocerScope — Find the cheapest groceries near you

GrocerScope is a Django app that scrapes local grocery stores, normalizes a user’s free-text query into a category (via Gemini with a robust fallback), streams live progress to the browser using Server-Sent Events (SSE), and displays the cheapest results with an AI shopping helper and CSV export.

✨ Features

• Zip + free-text search (e.g., “milk”, “frozen pizza”, “veggies”)
• AI category normalization (Gemini 2.5 Flash → produce | dairy | meat | bakery | frozen | pantry | beverages; with fallback)
• Live progress logs via SSE
• Scraping for multiple stores (Star Market, Trader Joe’s)
• Cheapest-first results + CSV export
• Built-in AI Shopping Assistant (quick summaries & tips)

🧱 Tech Stack

Django · Custom scrapers (Selenium) · Google Gemini (google-generativeai) · SSE · Vanilla JS/CSS

⚙️ Quick Setup

1) Prereqs

• Python 3.10+
• Chrome/Chromium + matching ChromeDriver (if scrapers use Selenium)
• Google AI Studio Gemini API key

2) Create & activate a virtualenv

python -m venv .venv
# Windows:
. .venv/Scripts/activate
# macOS/Linux:
source .venv/bin/activate

3) Prereqs

Create a .env file in the project root:

GEMINI_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

5. Run the app

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver