Grandma's lasagna lives in a photo album. The good chili recipe is a Pinterest pin that 404'd. Tuesday's dinner is whatever you can remember from last week's group chat. None of that needs a subscription box or an app that mines your grocery habits.
Mealie (~13.6k stars, AGPL) is a self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping list. Paste a URL and it scrapes ingredients and steps; type your own in the editor when the site fights back. Vue frontend, REST API for Home Assistant and other tools, translations for 35+ languages. One instance on your server, accounts for the household, no "premium import" tier.
What you get day to day
Recipe library. Import from links, organize with tags and categories, group favorites into cookbooks (weeknight dinners, holiday baking, whatever you name them). Scale servings, keep notes, attach images.
Meal plan. Drag recipes onto a calendar so "what are we eating?" stops being a 5 p.m. argument. The plan feeds the shopping list instead of you re-typing onions three times.
Shopping list. Ingredients roll up by aisle or section so you're not wandering the store with six apps open. Check items off on a phone browser; everyone sees the same list if they share the instance.
API. Mealie exposes a proper API — handy for automations, custom scripts, or piping tonight's plan into a dashboard. You're not locked into their UI forever.
Why run it yourself?
Family data stays family data. Diet restrictions, what you actually cook, and how often you order takeout are not great inputs for a venture-backed recipe startup. Self-hosting keeps that in your database on your disk.
No account sunset. Recipe apps get acquired, paywalled, or "sunsetted" with two weeks' notice. AGPL Mealie on a VPS you control outlasts the trend cycle.
Canada-friendly hosting. If you care where household data lives, a Canadian VM with backups beats syncing everything to a US SaaS by default.
Cost. A small Docker stack is cheap next to years of "family plan" subscriptions for basically structured text and images.
Deployment notes
Official image: ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie (also on Docker Hub as hkotel/mealie). Single container is normal: map host port to container 9000, persist /app/data/ on a volume (recipes, SQLite DB, uploads). For a busy household or heavy imports, switch DB_ENGINE to Postgres and point Mealie at your database container.
Set ALLOW_SIGNUP to false once you've created admin accounts — you don't want open registration on a public URL. Put HTTPS in front (Caddy, nginx, Traefik) if anyone hits it from outside the LAN. SMTP env vars are optional but nice for invites and password resets.
Resource-wise this is light: 1–2 GB RAM is plenty for most homes; disk grows with photos and imports, not with star count on GitHub.
Fit check
You'll like it if you collect recipes from blogs, plan meals with a partner or kids, and want one place that ties planning → shopping without re-entering ingredients.
Skip it if you cook from memory only or you're fine with a paper binder — Mealie shines when URLs and shared lists matter.
We run the Linux side: Docker on Canadian hardware, snapshots, TLS. Tell us how many household users you need and whether you want Postgres from day one; we'll size the box before you import a decade of bookmarks.
