Mealie

Hosted Mealie: managed recipe manager and meal planner hosting for households that want their recipes in one place, not in forty browser tabs.

Early Access

This app is a brand-new addition to ElfHosted, and is considered beta. It runs, we test it, and your trial lets you prove it fits before you commit, but our support team does not yet have deep experience with it. Expect some trial and error: lean on the upstream documentation, experiment freely, and share what you learn in Discord, where the community and team are figuring these new apps out together. If you need a battle-tested workflow today, our established apps are the safer pick.

What is Mealie?

Mealie is a recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping list app for the whole household. Paste a link to almost any recipe on the web and Mealie imports it into a clean, standardized format: ingredients, steps, nutrition, and photos, all editable. Plan the week on the meal planner, generate a shopping list from the plan, and cook from a clutter-free recipe view instead of a blog post with a life story on top.

Key Features

• Import from any URL: Paste a recipe link and Mealie scrapes it into a structured recipe, photos included.
• AI included: AI ingredient parsing, recipe import from pasted text, translation and tagging run on AI included with your plan. No API key to find; prefer your own AI account? Add it as a provider instead.
• Meal planner: Plan breakfasts, lunches, and dinners on a weekly calendar, with rules for rotating categories.
• Shopping lists: Generate lists from your meal plan or add items ad hoc, organized by label and store.
• Cookbooks and tags: Organize recipes into cookbooks with filters, categories, tags, and tools.
• Household accounts: Every member of the household gets their own login, with shared or private recipes; OIDC support included.
• API and integrations: A full REST API for automation, plus webhooks for meal-plan notifications.

Mealie in Your Stack

Mealie joins the household corner of the catalog alongside Donetick (chores), Warracker (warranties), and LubeLogger (vehicles): the boring-but-essential life admin, handled. It runs as your own private instance, protected by ElfHosted single sign-on, with your recipe library stored on your persistent config volume.

Why Run Mealie on ElfHosted?

A recipe library grows for years. ElfHosted keeps Mealie updated, backed up, and reachable from every device in the kitchen while you just cook.

• Managed access and support: Provisioned in minutes, kept current with upstream releases, humans on Discord when you need them.
• Plays well with other ElfHosted apps: One dashboard, one subscription, one login for your whole app collection.
• Persistent config: Recipes, meal plans, users, and photos survive restarts and upgrades.
• Simple subscription: One flat monthly price with a 7-day trial, cancel anytime.

Works With

• Any recipe site: URL import handles the vast majority of recipe pages.
• Browsers and phones: Responsive web app that works great on a kitchen tablet; installable as a PWA.
• Home automation: REST API and webhooks for the tinkerers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I log in the first time?
Mealie ships with a fixed default admin login of changeme@example.com / MyPassword. Your instance is protected by ElfHosted single sign-on so only you can reach it, but you should still sign in and change both the email and password immediately under Settings, then create accounts for the rest of the household.

Does Mealie include recipes?
No. The subscription is for managed Mealie hosting. You import recipes from the web or enter your own.

Can my whole family use it?
Yes. Mealie is multi-user with per-person logins, shared household recipes, and individual meal plans.

Do I need my own AI API key?
No. Add the included AI as a provider under Group Settings (our docs show the three fields to fill in) and Mealie's text AI features run on an allowance included with your plan. Photo import and video transcription need a provider of your own, billed by that provider directly.