Mensa#

Returns the daily menu of a German university canteen, sourced from the public OpenMensa API ( https://openmensa.org). No API key needed.

When to use#

Trigger this skill when the user asks for today's (or another day's) canteen / "Mensa" menu, e.g. "What's for lunch at the Mensa today?" or "Mensaplan heute".

Agent flow#

1. No config yet? Ask the user for a city.

2. List canteens in that city first (do not save anything yet): bash

   python3 {baseDir}/mensa_today.py --list "<city>"
   
   

   Show the resulting list to the user and ask which canteen should be the default.

3. Run setup with the user's chosen default: bash

   python3 {baseDir}/mensa_today.py --setup "<city>" --default "<chosen-canteen-substring>"
   
   

   All canteens in that city are saved as aliases; the chosen one is marked as default. If the user does not pick (e.g. "egal"/"any"), call --setup "<city>" without --default; the first canteen returned by OpenMensa is then used.

4. Menu queries: bash

   python3 {baseDir}/mensa_today.py                       # default canteen, today
   python3 {baseDir}/mensa_today.py "UniCampus"           # any canteen in the city, by name substring
   python3 {baseDir}/mensa_today.py "Otto Hahn" --date 2026-06-02
   
   

   Substring matching is normalised — special characters ( -, ,, .) are ignored, so a query like "Otto Hahn" matches a canteen named "Mensa Otto-Hahn-Straße".

5. "No canteen matched"? The query did not resolve to any saved alias. Show the user the available aliases (the script prints them) and offer to re-run --setup for a different city.

Output rules (strict)#

When rendering the menu back to the user, follow these rules verbatim:

• Always present dishes as a bullet-point list, one bullet per dish. No prose, no inline comma lists, no tables.
• Never abbreviate, summarise, or truncate dish names. Reproduce each dish name exactly as the script printed it (German umlauts, commas, parentheses included). Do not collapse a long name to "Pfann…" or "[---]".
• Do not list Beilagen or Reste. The script already filters out items whose category contains "Beilage" and items whose name contains "Restproduktion"; if such an item still slips through, omit it from the rendered list.
• Keep the script's header line (date) at the top, then the bullet list.

Example output#

text

2026-05-26 - Menu (student price)
- Spaghetti Bolognese - 2.80 EUR
- Couscous - 2.60 EUR (vegetarian)
- Türkische Linsensuppe, Fladenbrot - 1.80 EUR (vegan)

Network egress#

Outbound HTTPS to openmensa.org only. No credentials, no telemetry, no user data sent. The user's city and canteen choice stay in a local config.json next to the script.

Files#

• mensa_today.py — entry point (no third-party deps, stdlib only)
• config.json — created on first --setup, holds chosen canteen ids (gitignored, never uploaded)
• README.md, LICENSE.md