Backing up District

We backed up District’s public catalog across India. It is available here as a searchable archive, with an open TypeScript SDK for live reads.

This release currently contains 24,513 restaurant listings, 5,089 events, 837 movies, 3,154 cinemas, and 1,783 play venues across 1,328 cities.

District is Zomato’s product for going out: events, movies, dining, play, and shopping. It has a polished consumer product, but no public developer interface and no durable public record of what its catalog contains.

A listing can disappear as soon as an event ends, a venue closes, or the product changes. This archive is a small attempt to preserve that moving layer of city culture and make it useful to researchers, developers, and curious people.

The idea was inspired by Anna’s Archive backing up Spotify: describe the collection plainly, publish useful access, and be honest about what is and is not preserved.

Before diving into the details, here is a quick overview:

• The archive covers District’s guest-visible catalog in 1,328 cities.
• Dining is the largest vertical, with 24,513 known restaurant listings.
• Events, movies, cinemas, play venues, and stores are indexed in the same queryable database.
• The counts above are loaded from the live archive and will change as the catalog changes.
• The archive contains public metadata, not tickets, media files, private account data, or purchases.

You can search the collection, inspect the data exploration, or use district-kit from your own code.

— Vandit · vaandeetttt.com

Data exploration

The shape of the archive reflects the product. Restaurants dominate by raw count. Events are fewer but change faster. Movies are shared across cities while cinemas and sessions are local. “Play” collects everything from sports facilities to activity venues.

The most useful first view is geographic. A nationwide count can hide how strongly listings cluster around large cities, and how unevenly each vertical is represented elsewhere. The exploration page shows these high-level cuts without exposing collection operations.

What a record contains

Records keep the public identity needed to recognize and query an entity: names, stable identifiers where available, city, category, and selected public attributes such as rating or price. The archive favors a compact, understandable dataset over mirroring every byte of an application response.

Access

The simplest way to inspect the data is the browser. It searches across the verticals and can be narrowed by type or city.

Developers can use the district-kit package. It is a hand-written TypeScript client for the public guest surface, with typed resources for search, discovery, events, movies, dining, locations, and other documented reads.

What this is not

This is not a ticket mirror, checkout bot, private account dataset, or guide to attacking District’s infrastructure. Purchase flows, credentials, raw protocol notebooks, and operational tooling are not published here.

It is also not a perfect historical record. Some verticals are deeper than others, live prices and showtimes change quickly, and upstream product changes can reshape the visible catalog overnight. This is best-effort preservation, not a vendor SLA.

Why publish it

Without a public reference, every developer starts from zero: rediscovering the same interfaces, building the same parsers, and keeping isolated notes. Publishing the SDK and a clean catalog turns that repeated work into a foundation other people can use.

More importantly, city listings are cultural metadata. They describe where people eat, what they watch, which performers tour, and what kinds of places exist at a moment in time. Any single listing is ordinary. At nationwide scale, the collection becomes a record worth keeping.

Current state

The public status page reports freshness, while the counts at the top of this essay come directly from the live archive. The website, SDK, and high-level documentation are public. Sensitive implementation material remains private.

This is the first useful version, not the final one. The archive will become more valuable as its history grows.