UNSW course vectorizer

Built a student-focused, self-hosted AI assistant that answers questions about UNSW Computer Science courses using RAG, web scraping, and Gemini, for personal use and learning support

Setup

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/mxnnxt/unsw-ai-helper.git
cd unsw-course-vectorizer

2. Set up environment variables Backend .env in project root:

GEMINI_API_KEY=your_gemini_api_key
PORT=4000

3. Run with Docker

docker-compose up --build

This starts:

• ChromaDB on localhost:8000
• Backend on localhost:4000
• Frontend (if dockerized) or run manually using:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

4. Scrape the handbooks

node scraper/getCourses/js

This will generate a list of all the comp couses offered by UNSW. Then do get the handbook data of each course run:

node scraper/scrapeCourse.js

5. Embed course data After scraping and preprocessing data:

node scripts/embedCourses.js