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Mealie

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend.

Description

Mealie allows you to easily import recipes from websites, manage your food inventory, and plan your weekly meals.

Where it fits in the stack

Category: Service / Home Automation

Typical use cases

  • Organizing a personal recipe collection.
  • Meal planning and grocery list generation.
  • Importing recipes from URLs with high accuracy.

Strengths

  • Excellent recipe parsing from external websites.
  • Mobile-friendly responsive UI.
  • Comprehensive REST API.

Limitations

  • Requires a database (PostgreSQL recommended for production).
  • Still under active development with occasional breaking changes.

When to use it

  • If you have a large collection of recipes you want to digitize and organize.
  • If you want a self-hosted alternative to Paprika or Yummly.

When not to use it

  • For simple shopping lists without recipe integration.

Getting started

The easiest way to install Mealie is via Docker Compose.

Installation (Docker)

docker run -d \
  --name mealie \
  -p 9925:9000 \
  -v mealie-data:/app/data/ \
  ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:latest

CLI examples

Mealie is primarily managed via the web UI or API, but you can interact with the container.

Check logs

docker logs -f mealie

API examples

Get all recipes (Python)

import requests

MEALIE_URL = "http://localhost:9925/api"
API_TOKEN = "your-api-token"

headers = {
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {API_TOKEN}"
}

response = requests.get(f"{MEALIE_URL}/recipes", headers=headers)
print(response.json())

Sources / References

Contribution Metadata

  • Last reviewed: 2026-04-26
  • Confidence: high