Meet 'n Eat

Find a restaurant roughly halfway between two people's locations.

How it works

Near me: On page load, the app shows restaurants within 5 km of your current location (via browser geolocation or IP address). Click "Go" and add a friend's address to switch to two-person mode.

Two-person search: Enter two addresses — yours and a friend's — and the app finds restaurants in the corridor between you. Results are filtered to places between 25% and 75% of the straight-line distance from each person, so nobody has to backtrack. When the two locations are more than 100 km apart, the midpoint is calculated along the driving route instead.

Features

• Near me search — Instantly see restaurants within 5 km of your current location
• Two-person search — Find restaurants halfway between two addresses
• Fuzzy address input with Google Places autocomplete (postal codes, transit stations, neighbourhoods, landmarks)
• Auto-searches as soon as you load the page (Near me) or both locations are selected (two-person)
• Map with a shaded corridor zone and colour-coded pins for each person and each restaurant
• Side-by-side layout on wide screens — map stays sticky while results scroll
• Restaurant cards showing cuisine type, rating, price level, open/closed status, and distance from each person
• Hovering a card highlights the corresponding map marker
• Sort results by rating, distance from midpoint, or price
• Filter by open now, minimum rating (3.5★ / 4.0★ / 4.5★), and price level ($–$$$$)
• Share button that copies a URL — opening it auto-populates both fields and runs the search
• Responsive layout (desktop side-by-side, mobile stacked)

Stack

All Google API calls are proxied through api.php so the key never reaches the browser.

Setup

Prerequisites

• A web host running PHP 7.4+ with curl enabled (any standard Apache/cPanel host works)
• A Google Maps Platform API key with these APIs enabled:
  • Places API (New)
  • Directions API
• A Mapbox account and public access token

Google API key hardening (do before going live)

1. Set a daily quota limit — Google Cloud Console → APIs & Services → Quotas → cap "Places API (New) – Nearby Search requests per day" to something safe (e.g. 100–200 for personal use)
2. Set a budget alert — Billing → Budgets & alerts → create a $5 budget with email alerts at 50% and 100%
3. Restrict the key — Credentials → edit key → restrict to Places API (New) and Directions API only; restrict by server IP address (not HTTP referrer, since calls are made server-side via PHP/curl)

Local development

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/sanjayvsingh/meet-n-eat.git
cd meet-n-eat

# Create your local config (excluded from git)
cp config.example.php config.php
# Edit config.php and paste your keys

# Start a local PHP server
php -S localhost:8080

# Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser

Configuration

Create config.php in the project root (it is gitignored):

<?php
define('GOOGLE_API_KEY', 'AIza...');
define('MAPBOX_TOKEN',   'pk.eyJ1...');

A template is provided in config.example.php.

File structure

meet-n-eat/
├── index.php         # Single-page app shell (injects Mapbox token server-side)
├── style.css         # All styles (responsive)
├── app.js            # All client-side logic
├── api.php           # Server-side proxy for Google APIs
├── .htaccess         # Sets index.php as directory index; blocks config files
├── config.php        # API keys — never committed (gitignored)
├── config.example.php
└── .gitignore

Search algorithm

All searches use the actual driving route rather than the straight-line geographic midpoint. Two people on opposite corners of a highway network get very different drive times to a geometric midpoint; route-based search finds restaurants that are genuinely equidistant by travel time.

1. Geocode both inputs via Google Places Autocomplete → coordinates
2. Fetch the driving route via Google Directions API
3. Find the 33%, 50%, and 67% waypoints along the driving route
4. Search sequentially at the 33%, 50%, and 67% route waypoints using Nearby Search, with a radius scaled to the straight-line distance (35% of distance, clamped 1.5–15 km, up to 60 results total)
5. Deduplicate results by place_id
6. Sort by rating (with review count as tiebreaker), distance from midpoint, or price

If no driveable route exists (cross-ocean searches etc.), a friendly message is shown with the two location pins on the map.

Zone overlay

The union of three circles centred at the 33%, 50%, and 67% route waypoints, each with a radius of 35% of the straight-line distance (clamped 1.5–15 km), clipped to the bounding box of the two endpoints. This matches the three Nearby Search queries and is intentionally wider than the exact road — a restaurant on a parallel street is equally valid if it's equidistant by drive time. The full driving route is shown as a line on the map.

Acknowledgments

• Near me feature — Designed and requested by C. Prepos

Roadmap

• Pagination to surface more results in dense areas
• Walking / transit travel time estimates
• Dark mode