iRail

iRail supports digital creativity concerning mobility in Belgium. This is an attempt to make the railway time schedules in Belgium easily available for anyone.

Our main site consists of a very easy mobile website to look up time schedules using our own API.

Native applications using the iRail API and created or supported by the iRail team are named BeTrains and RailerApp.

All information can be found on our blog at hello.iRail.be.

API Documentation

API Documentation can be found at https://docs.irail.be.

Installation for development purposes

note: you'll also need to have nodejs, composer and the PHP extensions listed in composer.json installed on your system

• Step 1: Clone this repo
• Step 2: Create an .env file which will contain your configuration.
• CACHE_DRIVER should be set to apc, an in-memory cache with good performance.
• NMBS_RIV_API_KEY should contain a valid API key for the internal NMBS RIV API.
• GTFS_RANGE_DAYS_BACKWARDS and GTFS_RANGE_DAYS_FORWARDS define how long in the past and future GTFS data will be
• APP_TIMEZONE should be set to EUROPE/BRUSSELS to ensure correct times in the responses, since several date/times without timezone information are parsed and interpreted at this timezone. read. This will affect memory usage, and limits the date ranges of some API endpoints.
• Step 4: Run the docker-compose configuration, which consists of nginx, mariadb and the actual PHP application. If you want to use sqlite, adjust the database configuration. Note that sqlite is untested.
• Step 5: When using mariadb, ensure a database exists on the mariadb server. It should match the database credentials specified for the php application in the docker-compose file.
• Step 6: Run the database migrations in order to create the necessary database tables: php artisan migrate
• Step 7: Enjoy your own iRail API at http://localhost:8080/. All routes are defined in the routes file. See the laravel docs for more information if needed.

Caching and performance

A working cache is required for the API to work correctly. Ensure APC is configured correctly when running this outside of the docker environment. Outgoing requests to NMBS servers should always be limited as much as possible!

Update stations list

Stations are updated through the irail/stations composer package. Just perform a composer update in the root of the project.

More links

• Our mailing list: http://list.irail.be/
• Our GTFS data dumps: http://gtfs.irail.be/
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/iRail/iRail/issues
• Just use our HTTP API: http://api.irail.be/
• BeTrains for Android app source code: https://github.com/iRail/BeTrains-for-Android
• Other repositories: https://github.com/iRail