During a few days in August I have coded a Laravel wrapper for the recommendation system Easyrec. If you want to display most viewed items, best rated items, related items or something like that, a recommendation system is the perfect way to go. If you are familiar with Machine Learning techniques, you now that a recommendation system is something very difficult. If you remember, Netflix offered $ 1,000,000 to improve its collaborative filtering algorithm.

Easyrec provides a REST API that you can call for free. This is something very convenient if don’t have a lot of data and that you still want to use a recommender system for your web service.

Features overview

After registering the service provider and the alias in your app/config/app.php file, it will be super easy to use! Here is a little overview of the available functions:

Easyrec::view(42, 'Post 42', 'http://example.com/posts/42', 200, null, null, 'POST'); // User #200 has viewed post #42
Easyrec::rate(42, 8, 'Book 42', 'http://example.com/books/42', 200, null, null, 'BOOK'); // User #200 has rated 8/10 book #42
Easyrec::mostViewedItems(10, 'WEEK', 'BOOK'); // Retrieves the 10 most viewed books for the last week
Easyrec::bestRatedItems(10, 'MONTH', 'POST'); // Retrieves the 10 best rated posts for the last month

Documentation and download

Of course the package is available via Composer. The full documentation can be found on GitHub: github.com/AntoineAugusti/laravel-easyrec.

Do not hesitate to open up an issue if something is not working as expected. Pull-requests are very welcome also!