Κοντά σου / Near you (working name: Simera)
Open the app, it finds where you are, and shows what matters around you right now: pharmacies and hospitals on duty, live bus arrivals, fuel prices for your prefecture with the stations around you, and what else is nearby (ATMs, EV chargers, bakeries, cafés, parking, playgrounds, ΚΕΠ ...). Attica first; places data covers all of Greece.
Modules
| Module | Status | Source |
|---|
| Fuel prices per prefecture (incl. heating oil) | working | fuelprices.gr daily PDF bulletins (archive from 2018; 2017 uses an unsupported Excel layout) |
| Live bus arrivals (Athens) | working | OASA telematics API (public, unofficial) |
| Metro and tram: nearest station, next departures (Athens) | working | ΣΤΑΣΥ GTFS feed (data.gov.gr, CC BY 4.0); exact day when the feed covers it, otherwise a representative same-weekday schedule labelled as indicative |
| Electricity tariff of the month | planned | RAAEY monthly tariff tables |
| Pharmacies on duty (Attica) | working | Attica Pharmacists' Association site (fsa-efimeries.gr), fetched daily for the next 7 days |
| Hospitals on duty (Attica) | working | Ministry of Health daily rota (.doc), converted with LibreOffice; hospital coordinates from a curated table (approximate) |
| Open-air market (λαϊκή) schedule | planned | curated table from regional decisions |
| Events near me | working | City of Athens culture portal (cultureisathens.gr), nearest first within the chosen radius |
| Bus route changes near you | working | OASA's own announcements feed (www.oasa.gr/feed): each post's lines and municipality are extracted and matched to the visitor's municipality and the lines at their nearby stops |
| What's nearby (20 place categories) | working | OpenStreetMap Greece extract imported weekly into the pois table; Overpass API only as a fallback |
| Location naming + prefecture detection | working | OSM Nominatim reverse geocoding (1 req/s, cached) + nearest prefecture centroid |
Data policy
Only openly published data is used. Places come from OpenStreetMap under the ODbL; the page carries the attribution. fuelprices.gr protects its station-level search with a
CAPTCHA intended to block automated collection; we respect that and use the openly published
bulletins (prefecture averages) instead.
Run
python3.10 -m venv --without-pip .venv && curl -sS https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | .venv/bin/python
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python -m simera.collectors.fuel --days 30 # or --all for the full archive, --repair to re-fetch bad parses
.venv/bin/python -m simera.collectors.pharmacies # next 7 days of Attica duty rotas
.venv/bin/python -m simera.collectors.hospitals # today's and tomorrow's Attica hospital rota (needs `soffice` on PATH)
.venv/bin/python -m simera.collectors.osm_pois # weekly: download the Greece OSM extract (~400 MB) and rebuild the places table
.venv/bin/python -m simera.collectors.gtfs # weekly: metro/tram timetable (GTFS)
scripts/devserver.sh start # dev server on :8891 with a pid file (stop|restart)
.venv/bin/uvicorn simera.api.main:app --reload
Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ for the page, http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs for the API.
Set DATABASE_URL to use PostgreSQL instead of the default SQLite file in data/.
Deploy (Render free tier + GitHub Pages)
- Push the repo to GitHub. Build a data snapshot here and attach it to a release:
scripts/snapshot.sh --release (prints the SNAPSHOT_URL).
- In Render: New → Blueprint, pick the repo;
render.yaml defines a free Docker web service. Set the SNAPSHOT_URL env var to the release asset URL. First boot downloads the snapshot (~40 MB) and starts collecting the daily data (pharmacies, hospitals, fuel) in the background; from then on once a day at 04:30 UTC.
- Build the page against the API and publish it:
python scripts/build_docs.py https://konta-sou-api.onrender.com [relay-url] [G-XXXXXXXXXX], commit docs/, enable GitHub Pages from the docs folder. The optional third argument is a Google Analytics 4 measurement id; Analytics loads only after the visitor accepts the consent bar. Set ALLOWED_ORIGINS on Render to your Pages origin.
- The snapshot rebuilds itself every Sunday on GitHub Actions (
.github/workflows/snapshot.yml) and is uploaded to the data release. To have the server restart with it automatically, copy the service's Deploy Hook URL from Render (Settings → Deploy Hook) into a repository secret named RENDER_DEPLOY_HOOK.
- Two sources (Ministry of Health hospital rota, OASA live buses) only answer from Greek networks.
worker/ is a tiny Cloudflare Worker relay that runs in Cloudflare's Athens data centre; deploy it (see worker/README.md) and set OASA_API_URL and MOH_BASE_URL on Render to its address. The current deployment uses https://konta-sou.charalambos-mitropoulos.workers.dev.
The free instance sleeps after 15 minutes without traffic; the first request afterwards takes about a minute.
The page: "Σήμερα" plus one chooser
The first screen shows Σήμερα (weather, ΕΜΥ warnings, name days) and one big chooser, "Τι ψάχνεις κοντά σου;".
Every option (pharmacies on duty, hospitals on duty, buses/metro, fuel, events, Attiki Odos & power cuts, and the
twenty OpenStreetMap place categories) has its own distance slider, with sensible bounds per option (buses up to
5 km, hospitals up to 30 km, places 200 m to 15 km). Results always come nearest first; long lists show the nearest
few and a "show the rest, further away" button. The API side: max_km on /api/pharmacies/on-duty,
/api/hospitals/on-duty and /api/transit/rail/near, max_km on /api/traffic/near, radius (up to 15 km) on
/api/nearby, radius and sort=distance|time on /api/events. The chosen option and radius are remembered on the
device; the last four options used appear as shortcuts on the first screen.
"Δρόμοι & ρεύμα" option
- Weather warnings: ΕΜΥ warnings through the MeteoAlarm CAP feed (
simera/alerts.py), matched to the visitor's region (prefecture → MeteoAlarm area), cached 15 min in memory.
- Attiki Odos live: the 600 vehicle-detection sensors published every minute on data.nap.gov.gr (ODbL),
simera/traffic.py; sensor coordinates converted from the Greek grid in simera/data/attiki_odos_vds.json. Sensors reporting 0 km/h are ignored as unreliable.
- Planned power cuts: ΔΕΔΔΗΕ's public lookup, one request per Attica municipality per day with a pause (
simera/collectors/outages.py), stored in power_outages; the visitor's municipality comes from the reverse geocoder and is matched by name, with a manual selector as fallback.
Bus changes near you (OASA announcements)
OASA posts every diversion, suspension and holiday schedule on www.oasa.gr, with an RSS feed. The collector
(simera/collectors/oasa_notices.py, every 6 h and daily) reads the feed, fetches each new post once with a
pause, and extracts the line codes from the title ("γραμμών 219 και 816" → 219, 816), the municipality
("στον Δήμο Αγ. Δημητρίου", matched to the ΔΕΔΔΗΕ municipality table, with a prefix rule for renamed
municipalities such as Σπάτων-Αρτέμιδος) and the dates from the body. /api/transit/notices?lat&lng&lines=
returns the notices that name the visitor's municipality, any of the lines at their nearby stops, or neither
(general ones such as holiday schedules), current ones first. The transit card lists them under the live
arrivals; the Σήμερα card shows a one-line shortcut when a change touches the visitor's area.
Events near you
Cultural events from the City of Athens portal cultureisathens.gr, which publishes its events through the public
WordPress REST API; each event page carries the date, venue, category, price and map coordinates
(simera/collectors/events.py, daily, pages fetched only when new or changed). Attica beyond the Municipality of
Athens is not covered yet. Facebook was ruled out: its events API is closed to third parties and scraping it
breaks its terms.
Known limits
- The Ministry of Health site and the OASA telematics API refuse connections from hosting networks abroad (observed from Render and GitHub Actions: HTTP 421 and timeouts). They do answer Cloudflare's Athens edge, which serves callers located in Greece: the page asks OASA through the relay in
worker/ straight from the visitor's phone, and visitors in Greece also refresh the relay's stored copy of the ministry rota pages, which the API server reads (see worker/README.md). If nobody in Greece opens the app for two weeks the copy expires; hospital rotas then fall back to HOSPITALS_URL, and bus endpoints on the server return 503 with a notice.
- About 1.5% of fuel bulletins since 2018 remain partially parsed (second-page column shifts in a few 2019–2020 files).
Daily run
scripts/daily.sh runs all collectors; schedule it with cron (see the comment in the script).
System dependencies
- LibreOffice (
soffice) for converting the Ministry of Health .doc rota to HTML.
Tests
.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q
