Application structure

Digest is a Django 5.2 project on SQLite, served by Gunicorn behind nginx. There is one app, recipes, and no CMS: the Django admin is the editing interface. The data model is built for structure rather than blobs of text — a Recipe carries the prose fields, times, pairing, nutrition (JSON) and a generation_meta JSON field holding provenance; ingredients are rows linked to a canonical IngredientName (one entity per ingredient across the whole site, with a hierarchical category tree) and a Unit with singular and plural labels; instructions are ordered steps in optional titled groups. Two further models close loops described below: RecipeVote (a signed-in reader's thumbs up or down) and RecipeImagePrompt (the exact prompt and composition of every generated photo).

Generation is not a separate service. It runs as Django management commands in the same codebase, scheduled by cron on the server — one daily run of gen_recipe_from_nyt --save, and every three days a scraper refresh. The commands keep their working state in three JSON files: a pool of scraped recipe inspirations, a ledger of already-used article and recipe URLs, and the current state of the variety rotation. Text generation goes through OpenAI's Responses API with JSON output; images through the Images API. The text model comes from the environment (GPT-5 in my configuration; the code falls back to gpt-4o-mini).