Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner that combines a REST API backend with a Vue-based frontend for managing recipes, planning meals, and organizing shopping lists.
The tool addresses the need for a private, family-friendly way to store and organize recipes without relying on external services. It lets users add recipes by importing from URLs, where Mealie automatically extracts relevant data, or by manually entering recipes through a UI editor. Beyond recipe storage, it includes a meal planner for scheduling weekly cooking and a shopping list feature that organizes ingredients by supermarket sections. Recipes can be grouped into cookbooks based on personal criteria.
Mealie suits households and families wanting to consolidate their recipes in one place while maintaining full control over their data through self-hosting. It works well for those comfortable with Docker deployment and appeals to users across multiple languages through its support for over thirty languages. The project provides a REST API, making it suitable for integration with third-party applications.
The project maintains active community engagement through a Discord channel and accepts contributions from both developers and non-developers. Development is supported through a structured contributors guide and VSCode Dev Containers to lower the barrier to entry for code contributors. Translation contributions are welcomed through a dedicated crowdsourcing platform, allowing non-technical users to help localize the application.
