Mealie
A recipe manager that imports from any URL and plans your meals
Alternative toPaprika
Mealie collects recipes by importing them from websites or typing them in, then helps plan meals and build shopping lists for the household. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed, with a Python backend and a Vue front end.
Best for when
- you save recipes from websites and want them in one clean place
- your household plans meals for the week
- you want shopping lists built from your meal plan
Watch out for
- importing fails on sites that do not publish structured recipe data
- ingredient parsing is imperfect, so quantities and units sometimes need editing
- major version upgrades have required data migrations in the past
Recipes, meal plans and shopping lists
Paste a recipe link and Mealie scrapes the ingredients, steps and photo into a clean recipe card, without the life story above it. You can scale servings, organise by tags and categories, plan meals on a calendar and turn the plan into a shopping list.
It suits households that cook regularly and want one shared cookbook. Several users can belong to the same household, and there is an API for those who want to connect it to other home tools.
What running it costs
One container with SQLite is enough for a family, with PostgreSQL as an option for larger setups. RAM use is a few hundred megabytes. Back up the data directory, which holds the database and recipe images, or use the built-in backup export.
Keep it on your home network or VPN, since phones in the kitchen need to reach it. Recipe imports depend on how sites publish their data, so some links need manual fixes.
