Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner, and is simply brilliant – It’s probably my favourite self-hosted app.
For quite a while, I had been gathering various recipes via the cookbook app in Nextcloud, but when I discovered Mealie, it was a complete game-changer – for reasons I’ll explain later.
Mealies’ interface is very good to use, and by adding tags to your recipes, you can search quickly for that perfect meal.
You also have an option to get Mealie to provide suggestions for recipes based on the ingredients you have to hand, as well as create meal planners, and shopping lists for ingredients.
The best feature of Mealie however, is the ability to scrape recipes from other websites and bring them into your recipe list.
When you find a great recipe online, all you need to do is grab the URL and add it into Mealie’s import engine and let Mealie do the rest. You can import recipes one at a time, or in bulk. (I’ve scraped the last few years worth of recipes from BBC good food in this way)
As well as tags, another way to organise your recipes is by creating cookbooks. When you create a cookbook, you specify which categories to include, automatically any recipes with those categories will then be added to the cookbook.
Setting up the Mealie container is really simple – the only thing you really need to amend is the volume data where Mealie will store its data.
