Restaurant Inspection Notifications

This code monitors Chicago's Open Data Portal for new inspections at your favorite restaurant. It runs on AWS and posts the results to Slack.

Here's how we'll do it:

1. Query the Food Inspections dataset once a day.
2. If an inspection record exists for your favorite restaurant, post a short summary and a link to the complete record to Slack.

Slack Webhook

Slack has a Python package, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to install it for Lambda. We'll use the requests module (available from botocore.vendored) to post with webhooks. Slack's documentation explains how to set it up. You'll need the URL Slack gives you.

Lambda Function

1. Choose create function.
2. Choose author from scratch.
3. Provide a name, choose Python 3.6, create new role from templates, name it, and then attach Basic Edge Lambda permissions and KMS decryption permissions.
4. Add Cloudwatch Events to the left and, if it's not there, Amazon Cloudwatch Logs to the right.
5. Click on Cloudwatch Events and scroll down.
6. Choose create new rule. Paste your cron expression in schedule expression. To run the query every day at noon GMT, enter cron(00 12 ? * * *).
7. Click on the box with the function name.
8. Paste inspection_function.py into the code box.
9. Define three environment variables:

• SLACK_URL: the URL Slack created for you when you created the webhook.
• CHANNEL: the Slack channel where you want your messages to appear, e.g. #general.
• AKA_NAME: The beginning of your favorite restaurant's AKA name. For Sun Wah it's %20%27SUN%20WAH%27.