Mealie
Self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner with automatic recipe scraping.
Why consider Mealie?
Mealie is an open-source recipe manager and meal planner. It automatically scrapes recipes from websites, formats ingredients, plans weekly meals, and generates shopping lists.
Learn Mealie by building
Practical setup notes, real use cases, and copy-ready examples in one focused guide.
In this guide10 sections
What is Mealie?
Mealie is an open-source, self-hosted recipe management and meal planning web application developed with FastAPI and Vue.js. It serves as a privacy-friendly alternative to commercial subscription recipe apps like Paprika, Mealime, and Plan to Eat.
Mealie allows home cooks to paste any recipe URL and automatically parse ingredients, cooking instructions, nutrition facts, and photos into a clean, ad-free format. It also provides interactive weekly meal calendars, dynamic ingredient scaling, and automated grocery shopping lists.
Who Is It For?
- Home Cooks & Families: Centralizing family culinary recipes and planning weekly dinner menus with automatic grocery list generation.
- Meal Preppers & Fitness Enthusiasts: Tracking nutritional values and scaling recipe serving sizes based on dietary goals.
- Self-Hosters: Running a clean, ad-free recipe database accessible from any phone, tablet, or kitchen smart display.
Key Features
- One-click recipe scraper supporting hundreds of recipe websites using Schema.org JSON-LD microdata.
- Interactive weekly meal planner with drag-and-drop calendar scheduling.
- Automated grocery shopping list creator that groups items by supermarket aisle categories.
- Dynamic serving scaler adjusting ingredient quantities automatically based on guest counts.
- Multi-user support with shared household recipe books and private cooking notes.
Deploying Mealie with Docker Compose
version: '3.7'services: mealie: image: ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:v3.23.1 container_name: mealie restart: unless-stopped ports: - "9000:9000" environment: - ALLOW_SIGNUP=true - PUID=1000 - PGID=1000 - TZ=UTC - BASE_URL=http://localhost:9000 volumes: - ./mealie_data:/app/data/Start the instance:
docker compose up -dOpen http://localhost:9000 in your web browser to create your primary administrator account and import your first recipe.
Practical Use Cases
1. One-Click Recipe Import
A home cook finds an online recipe cluttered with advertisements, copies the URL into Mealie, and receives a clean, standardized recipe card with step-by-step instructions in seconds.
2. Weekly Family Meal Planning & Grocery Lists
A family schedules five dinners on the interactive calendar; Mealie automatically combines all required ingredients into a categorized shopping checklist on their mobile phones.
3. Kitchen Tablet Cook Mode
A cook mounts a tablet in the kitchen and activates Mealie's "Cook Mode", which keeps the screen awake and provides large, touch-friendly step-by-step checklists with integrated timers.
Troubleshooting and Limitations
- Complex Ingredient Parsing: When importing custom foreign recipes, double-check ingredient quantities in case non-standard measurement units require minor manual adjustment.
- Database Backup: Mealie includes an automated backup scheduler in Settings -> Data Management; schedule daily JSON exports to ensure your recipe catalog is safe.
Official Resources
- Official Website: https://mealie.io
- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie
- Documentation: https://docs.mealie.io
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