Mealie has been solid for me
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
70 points (97.3% liked)
Selfhosted
40696 readers
339 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
+1 for mealie. Been running it for maybe six months now and it’s great.
Mealie is absolutely the best
-
Home Assistant integration
-
SSO through OIDC (though mine is broken and I need to file a bug)
-
meal planning functionality with shopping checklists
-
equipment checklists
-
advanced grouping through tagging, cookbooks, and categories. Everything can be beautifully sorted
-
then the holy grail: recipe parsing through URL. I haven't found recipe parsing this good since the discontinued ChefTap app
Which docker compose file to use?
This one has a weird image source https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie/blob/mealie-next/docker/docker-compose.dev.yml
And this one expects me to build the container locally first which sounds like a dev version although the other file is named dev https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie/blob/mealie-next/docker/docker-compose.yml
The meal planner feature have been a godsend for our household.
Tandoor
A directory full of plaintext files. Can cat them from the command line.
Yep, this is how we've kept ours for over 20 years. Even if you don't use the command line, most graphical file browsers will search through text files without issue.
I ended up creating my own because I couldn't find something that did what I want a few years ago when I started looking. My main requirement was easy scaling of ingredients. It has a handful of features around that such as scaling by specifying servings, scaling by setting the amount of a particular ingredient (example making pancakes with leftover buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into the bowl then scale the recipe based on how much was left) and ingredient conversion. In most other ways it is pretty basic and free-form but it does the job. It stores data in a user-provided provider so other people never send me their recipes.
Paprika. I haven't used anything else aside from having a folder of word documents.
Paprika allows you to copy/paste the URL of a recipe and it will download only the recipe. No more scrolling through a blog and a dozen ads looking for what you want. You can then create categories and tag recipes for any combination of categories.
It also has extra functions like meal planners, pantry inventory, and shopping list generators based on the meal plan and pantry, but I don't use those.
It syncs between devices. The only real downside is you must purchase per platform type. If you bought the windows licence and you want it on your phone you must separately purchase the Android licence.
Paprika 3 is great! Highly recommend
I've been using RecipeSage for a while now. It replaced Paprika for me. Runs easily in Docker, and it can create a recipe from a URL.
I'll check it out, thx
Another vote for RecipeSage here, I like that it can scrape recipes from a URL, and I really like how it can scale ingredients by how many servings you want to make.
I haven't played with it but I installed tandoor.dev ready for when I get time to look at it.
I print out the recipes i want and put them in a binder. It's 100x easier than trying to fuck around with my phone while i am trying to bake.
That's why I use an iPad or my laptop.
But I also print recipes and bind them
I simply use Joplin subnotebooks. I have one for home cooking and one for brewing beer. Markdown works well enough for me in terms of portability and readability. It also syncs between my devices, so I have several copies of my recipes.
For home brewing, I have written a few scripts that convert BeerXML to Markdown for easy importing. I create the recipes in my home brewing software (currently Kleiner Brauhelfer), export the BeerXML file and convert it to Markdown for secondary storing.
Mealie previously, now Homechart. Mealie is probably better suited to the specific purpose, but Homechart includes a mess of other functions.
I guess this doesn't qualify as self-hosted but I'm gonna comment anyway. I really like Pestle for iOS. I love the way it cuts the shit out of those 5,000,000 paragraph long introductions before the actual recipe and just grand the important parts. It's very handy.
KitchenOwl has been working for me though I was primarily after a good shared shopping list app. iOS app is easy for family members to use and recipes and ingredients from urls get ingested well with minimal reconfiguration - from the sites I use anyway.
I use mealie, but an older version which still has its recipes public. Still waiting for that to be an option on newer versions.
I was in the exact same boat as you, but its pretty much there now. You can set a specific user group (i.e. Default) to have its recipes be public and then redirect index to that page.
Also I recommend upgrading because IIRC there's a security vuln with that old version of Mealie
Obsidian has a recipe plugin.
I've been using copymethat but I'm trying to move to obsidian.
Could you elaborate on “move to obsidian”? I’m already storing some recipes in my vault, but I would be interested in further features like shopping list generation and other filtering options.
I'm trying to find that out myself, just started playing with it yesterday. Right now I've got a personal store of recipes in CopyMeThat, and that's got some nice features like meal planning and shopping lists but its not integrated into anything.
I've seen a few approaches so far, some guy on the forums has all the ingredients stored in the front matter and uses dataviewjs to display them in the note which allows for unit conversion but I think that's too much, I still want to be able to read them without obsidian.
Right now I've got tags and method and ingredients in the front matter along with checklist add-on formatted tasks in the main part of the note. Eventually I want to have it pull a recipe at random and put it in my weekly note or something.
Yeah, I’d also generally prefer to use my front matter for my global tagging and sorting so I can keep my templating consistent. I’m not explicitly opposed to adding more, but in an ideal world I’d keep my front matter pretty trim.
I’ll do some experiments of my own with data view and such to see if I can get some good functionality.
Supercook for recipes with filters and based on ingredients you have on hand.
Really helpful. I tried probably 6 apps a year ago, including Paprika, and nothing came close. Voice to text for adding ingredients is awesome when you come back from the grocery store.
When looking for recipes, you can spice things up by filtering for recipes where you're only missing one, two, or three ingredients too, which really opens things up.
This past week, it suggested some amazing dishes I hadn't tried before. One was a tofu dish with 6 cloves of garlic with skin on, onions, red pepper flakes, lime, and super firm tofu. Delicious over basmati rice.
The other was a pecan streusel coffee cake. Didn't even know I had ingredients to make this. Freaking delicious.
The recipes pull from across the Internet and they do a great job removing the fluff to show you just the recipe, but if their coding messes up you can always go directly to the recipe source too.
You can favorite recipes of course too.
Finally you can start a shopping list there too. So let's say you're browsing for some new recipes and you have that filter on for "missing 1 ingredient". Simply add it to your shopping list along with whatever else you need. If you are diligent about updating your pantry in the app as you use up ingredients, you can also just review all food you have and use the app to keep building your shopping list for the rest of your normal supermarket trips.
It's an all around great app and totally free without ads. I assume they sell your pantry data and grocery list data to stay afloat. Which.. I really don't care about.
Lots of people saying mealie or tandoor, so I'll say Grocy. I don't use it for every single food item but mainly for spices and frozen items and the recipe functionality is pretty good.
Sucks that it isn't available in the ios app though.
I've tried several, but I've had a major incident and lost all of the recipes I had because of a database corruption.
So I decided against keeping recipes in databases. I migrated to Notion, but I kept looking for a replacement since that's not self-hosted. Eventually I ran across Silverbullet, and I've been using it for everything, so far it's been great. Not exactly specifically what you asked but it can be used for it and works great.
And a lesson to all as to why backups are essential.
Meh. That'll never happen to me...
Hahah, enjoy my upvote for speaking what all of us have thought at one time or another.
I think I've finally hit an ok point with backups: 3 copies of everything at home (on spinning disks), with one backup in the cloud. And I'm working on building a backup system between my brother's house and mine.
A notebook and a pen.
Okay, boomer