Dynamic Recipe Discovery

Welcome back! So far, you’ve learned how to build API endpoints that let users retrieve recipes, search by ingredients, and view recipe steps. These features are essential for any recipe app, but sometimes users want a little more excitement or guidance. For example, what if someone can’t decide what to cook and wants a random suggestion? Or maybe they want to see the most popular recipes based on ratings from other users.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to add two new features to your cooking helper API:

• An endpoint that returns a random recipe
• An endpoint that returns the most popular recipes based on user ratings

These features make your app more interactive and helpful, giving users new ways to discover recipes.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly remind ourselves how we’ve been working with recipes so far.

Previously, you built endpoints to:

• List all recipes with pagination (so users don’t get overwhelmed by too many results at once)
• Retrieve a single recipe by its ID
• Search for recipes by ingredients

All of these endpoints use Express for routing and Prisma to interact with the database. You’ve also learned how to format JSON responses so that the data is easy to use in any app.

Now, let’s build on these skills to add dynamic selection features.

Let’s start by creating an endpoint that returns a random recipe. This is useful for users who want to try something new or can’t decide what to cook.

First, we need to define a new route in our Express app. We’ll use the Express router to create a GET endpoint at /api/recipes/random.

recipes.get("/random", async (_req, res) => {
  // Implementation will go here
});

This sets up the endpoint, but it doesn’t do anything yet.

To select a random recipe from the database, we use Prisma’s count method to get the total number of recipes, then generate a random number to skip that many records, and finally use findFirst to retrieve the recipe.

const total = await prisma.recipe.count();
if (!total) return res.status(404).json({ error: "No recipes found" });
const skip = Math.floor(Math.random() * total);
const recipe = await prisma.recipe.findFirst({
  skip,
  include: { ingredients: { include: { ingredient: true } } },
});

• prisma.recipe.count() gets the total number of recipes.
• Math.floor(Math.random() * total) picks a random index to skip.
• prisma.recipe.findFirst({ skip, ... }) retrieves the recipe at that random position, including its ingredients.

If there are no recipes in the database, recipe will be null.