mealie

Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend application built in Vue for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recipes into your database by providing the url and mealie will automatically import the relevant data or add a family recipe with the UI editor

⭐ 12,123 stars on GitHub · 🍴 1,236 forks · 📜 License: agpl-3.0 · 💻 Language: Python

What is mealie?

If you want a family-friendly recipe system without handing your food habits to a SaaS app, Mealie is one of the strongest self-hosted options. Its differentiator is the full workflow: recipe import, meal planning, and shopping lists in one clean web app instead of a glorified bookmark folder.

Main components

• Recipe manager with URL import, manual entry, tagging, and searchable saved recipes.
• Meal planner for scheduling what you’ll cook across the week.
• Shopping list generator that turns planned meals and ingredients into actionable lists.
• Cookbook organization for grouping recipes by cuisine, diet, family member, season, or any custom theme.
• Vue-based frontend backed by a Python REST API, making it usable in the browser and scriptable from other tools.
• Docker-first deployment, suitable for a home server, NAS, VPS, or homelab stack.
• Localisation support with translations for 35+ languages, useful for mixed-language households.

Clear use cases

• Build a private recipe archive from food blogs, YouTube-linked sites, and old family recipes.
• Plan weekly meals for a household and generate a shopping list before going to the supermarket.
• Replace scattered recipe notes across Google Docs, bookmarks, screenshots, and messaging apps.
• Share a curated cookbook with family members without relying on commercial meal-planning platforms.
• Integrate recipes or meal data into other home automation or dashboard setups via the REST API.

Mealie feels more practical than most recipe managers because it focuses on the boring parts that actually matter: getting recipes in quickly, finding them again, planning meals, and buying ingredients. The URL importer is the key convenience feature; you can paste a recipe link and avoid manually copying ingredients, timings, and instructions from ad-heavy cooking sites. When imports fail or you want to preserve a handwritten family recipe, the UI editor gives you a straightforward fallback.

For sysadmins, deployment is refreshingly normal. It is a Python application with a reactive Vue frontend, packaged for easy Docker deployment, so it fits neatly into a typical reverse-proxy-and-containers setup. The REST API also makes it more than a household web app: you can automate around it, connect it to dashboards, or build small integrations for your own workflow.

The biggest strength is owning the whole meal workflow — Mealie is not just a recipe database, and it is not just a weekly planner. It gives you the same practical loop that commercial apps sell — save recipes, plan meals, make shopping lists — while keeping the data on your infrastructure and making it available to the whole household.

Best for homelab users, privacy-conscious families, and self-hosters who want a polished recipe and meal-planning app that non-technical people will actually use.

Topics: the project is tagged with popular topics:

• 🏷️ meal-plans
• 🏷️ recipe-manager
• 🏷️ self-hosted

Quick install

See the README for detailed install instructions. Most projects support Docker — if the repo has a Dockerfile, use:

git clone https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie.git
cd mealie
docker build -t mealie .
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 mealie

Minimum system requirements

⚡ Deploy fast on VSIS

Use the VSIS VPS Lite 2GB RAM / 2 vCPU / 25GB SSD (~104k/tháng) plan from VSIS.NET — high-speed VN-based VPS, 24/7 support, ideal for running mealie smoothly.

🎯 Benefits:

• One-command docker compose up -d deploy in 2 minutes
• Dedicated IPv4, root access, unmetered domestic bandwidth
• Daily snapshot backup
• Free install assistance from the VSIS team

👉 See matching VPS plans at vsis.net

Resources

• 🔗 GitHub: mealie-recipes/mealie
• 🌐 Homepage: https://docs.mealie.io
• 📚 Official docs: see README in the repo
• 💬 Community: GitHub Issues + Discussions

Article compiled from GitHub data on 05/05/2026. Star/fork counts may have changed — see live numbers via the GitHub link.