geek-cookbook/manuscript/recipes/mealie.md

description

description
A tasty tool to manage your meals and shopping list

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 url¹ , and mealie will automatically import the relevant data or add a family recipe with the UI editor.

Mealie also provides a secure API for interactions from 3rd party applications.

!!! question "Why does my recipe manager need an API?" An API allows integration into applications like Home Assistant that can act as notification engines to provide custom notifications based of Meal Plan data to remind you to defrost the chicken, marinade the steak, or start the CrockPot. See the official docs for more information. Additionally, you can access any available API from the backend server. To explore the API spin up your server and navigate to http://yourserver.com/docs for interactive API documentation.

--8<-- "recipe-standard-ingredients.md"

Preparation

Setup data locations

First we create a directory to hold the data which mealie will serve:

mkdir /var/data/mealie

Create environment

There's only one environment variable currently required (db_type), but let's create an .env file anyway, to keep the recipe consistent and extensible.

mkdir /var/data/config/mealie
cat << EOF > /var/data/config/mealie/mealie.env
db_type=sqlite
EOF

Setup Docker Swarm

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like this:

--8<-- "premix-cta.md"

version: "3.2" # https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/#version-3

services:
  app:
    image: hkotel/mealie:latest
    env_file: /var/data/config/mealie/mealie.env
    volumes:
      - /var/data/mealie:/app/data
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    deploy:
      labels:
        # traefik
        - traefik.enable=true
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public

        # traefikv1
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:mealie.example.com
        - traefik.port=9000
        - traefik.frontend.auth.forward.address=http://traefik-forward-auth:4181
        - traefik.frontend.auth.forward.authResponseHeaders=X-Forwarded-User
        - traefik.frontend.auth.forward.trustForwardHeader=true        

        # traefikv2
        - "traefik.http.routers.mealie.rule=Host(`mealie.example.com`)"
        - "traefik.http.routers.mealie.entrypoints=https"
        - "traefik.http.services.mealie.loadbalancer.server.port=9000"
        - "traefik.http.routers.mealie.middlewares=forward-auth"

    networks:
      - traefik_public

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true

Serving

Mealie is served!

Launch the mealie stack by running docker stack deploy mealie -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>. The first time you access Mealie at https://YOUR FQDN, you might think there's something wrong. There are no recipes, and no instructions. Hover over the little plus sign at the bottom right, and within a second, two icons appear. Click the "link" icon to import a recipe from a URL:

--8<-- "recipe-footer.md"

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1. I scraped all these recipes from https://www.food.com/search/penguin ↩︎