Day5MovieRecommender 🎬

A Django web app that pulls movie data from TMDb (The Movie Database) and shows popular titles, movie details, and recommendations.

This project follows the build described in the accompanying write-up: “Day 5: Building a Movie Recommendation System with Django and TMDb API”.

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Features

• Popular movies landing page (grid/list of trending/popular titles)
• Movie detail page with overview + poster
• Recommendations section (similar / recommended movies from TMDb)
• Poster images rendered using TMDb image base URL

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Tech Stack

• Python
• Django
• TMDb API (movie metadata + recommendations)

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Project Structure (high-level)

Typical layout for this repo:

• MovieRecommendation/ – Django project root (contains manage.py)
• movies/ – Django app for pages, templates, and TMDb integration
• movies/utils.py – helper to call TMDb endpoints and attach poster URLs

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Getting Started

1) Clone

git clone https://github.com/Mathurdanduprolu/Day5MovieRecommender.git
cd Day5MovieRecommender

2) Create & activate a virtual environment

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   # macOS/Linux
# .venv\Scripts\activate  # Windows (PowerShell)

3) Install dependencies

If the repo contains a requirements.txt, install from it:

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you don't have requirements.txt, the minimum packages for the tutorial build are:

pip install django requests

4) Add your TMDb API key

Create a TMDb key from your TMDb account settings.

Then set it in Django settings (quick tutorial-style approach):

MovieRecommendation/settings.py

TMDB_API_KEY = "your_tmdb_api_key_here"

Tip: In a real deployment, prefer environment variables instead of hardcoding secrets.

5) Run the app

From the folder that contains manage.py:

python manage.py runserver

Open:

• http://127.0.0.1:8000/ – Popular movies
• Click a movie → details page with recommendations

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How Recommendations Work

Recommendations are fetched directly from the TMDb endpoint:

• movie/{movie_id}/recommendations

So the “recommender” here is TMDb’s recommendation service, surfaced via Django pages.

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Screens / Demo

If you have a screen recording or screenshots, add them here (GitHub renders images nicely):

![Home](docs/home.png)
![Detail](docs/detail.png)

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Roadmap / Ideas

• Search movies
• Pagination
• User accounts + watchlist
• Genre filters

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Credits

• Movie data powered by TMDb.
• Tutorial reference: Day 5 write-up on building the project with Django + TMDb API.