Projects / Mealie

Mealie

Home & Everyday Life

Organize household recipes, weekly meals, and shopping lists in one self-hosted application.

Use with conditions
Last updatedRelease 2026-09-24
Open source licenseAGPL-3.0
PlatformsLinux amd64 / arm64 containers · Web
DeploymentContainers / self-hosted

About this project

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager with meal planning and shopping lists. Recipes can be collected from supported website URLs, entered manually, or imported from structured content. Saved recipes can then be edited and used in upcoming meal plans. This connects collecting cooking instructions, maintaining the recipe collection, and preparing purchases within the same application.

A calendar organizes breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, with notes and random recipe selection also available. Ingredients can be added to shopping lists and organized with labels. Groups share recipe collections, while households keep their meal plans and shopping activity separate. Shared cooking references and an individual household's everyday planning therefore have distinct organizational scopes.

Administrators can back up and restore the complete installation. SQLite is the default database, documented for local storage and smaller deployments. PostgreSQL provides a route for network storage, more concurrent connections, or particular search capabilities. Database selection and backups are deployment decisions; the same recipe interface does not imply identical requirements for every storage arrangement.

Decision guide
01

Why it is worth a look

  • Recipe URL import and manual editing in one application
  • First-party usage or installation documentation is available
  • A verifiable formal release record is available
02

Before you use it

  • The official container requires a 64-bit platform and does not support 32-bit ARM
  • SQLite suits general household use; some capabilities require PostgreSQL
  • Change default account information and verify backups on first installation
Manual setupHigh
With an AI agentModerate
DeploymentContainers / self-hosted
Additional requirements3 confirmed; others not verified

Start with the official SQLite Compose configuration; Confirmed requirements: Command line, Docker, An always-on device or service; Some requirements have not been verified. Check the official setup instructions.

03

What it can do

  • Import recipes by URL
  • Manual recipe editing
  • Weekly meal plan
  • Shopping lists
  • Recipe collections

Who it fits

Good for

Households that cook and plan shopping regularly; People willing to maintain a small home service

Not a fit

Unwilling to maintain a self-hosted service and not considering hosting providers; Only accepting a workflow without checking permissions and data backups

Getting started

  1. Start with the official SQLite Compose configuration
  2. Set the address, default account, and storage
  3. Start the container and change the default password
  4. Import one recipe and try the backup function