A small CakePHP 5 application that catalogs real restaurants (pulled from OpenStreetMap) and lets users search them in plain English, e.g. "outdoor seating and vegetarian options", using pgvector for the similarity search.

See this article on the CakeDC website for the full walkthrough: the Postgres schema, the custom Cake\Database\Type that maps a vector column to a PHP float[], the toy embedding generator, and the cosine-distance finder that powers the search.

• DDEV (bundles PHP 8.5 and PostgreSQL 18 with pgvector pre-installed via .ddev/db-build/Dockerfile)

ddev start
ddev composer install
ddev cake migrations migrate
ddev cake import_restaurants --city=madrid   # or --city=brooklyn

Then visit /restaurants/search?q=outdoor+seating+wine (or whatever your imported city's restaurants mention) on the DDEV-provided URL.

The catalog is seeded from real, free, open data pulled from OpenStreetMap via its Overpass API, no API key required. Running bin/cake import_restaurants --city=<city> fetches restaurant nodes for that city's bounding box, builds a description from their OpenStreetMap tags, embeds it, and upserts the result by OpenStreetMap's node id. See src/Vector/OverpassClient.php, src/Vector/DescriptionBuilder.php, and src/Command/ImportRestaurantsCommand.php.

src/Vector/EmbeddingGenerator.php builds vectors with a hashed bag-of-words scheme (no external API, no API key) so the demo works out of the box. It's a toy: good enough to show restaurants that share vocabulary landing close together, not a substitute for a trained embedding model. The article on the CakeDC website explains the trade-off and how to swap in a real embedding API.

Read and edit the environment specific config/app_local.php and set up the 'Datasources' and any other configuration relevant to your setup. Other environment agnostic settings can be changed in config/app.php.