Mealie

What is Mealie?

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager that imports recipes from a URL, stores them in a structured format, and generates shopping lists from your meal plan. It is designed to be shared with a household and works well on mobile.

Best for

Families planning meals and building shared shopping lists

Why choose Mealie

Mealie is the tool that makes meal planning stop being a notes-app problem. It imports a recipe from a URL and extracts the ingredients and steps properly, builds a week's plan on a calendar, and turns that plan into a shopping list organised by aisle. Shared among a household, it replaces the four separate notes and screenshots most families use, and it does so without sending your recipe collection or your eating habits to any advertising company.

Replaces

• Paprika
• Paprika Recipe Manager
• Google Keep lists

Key features

• Import recipes from URL
• Meal planning calendar
• Automatic shopping lists
• Household sharing

What to watch out for

Recipe import quality depends entirely on how the source site is built; sites with heavy JavaScript or aggressive paywalls will need manual entry, and the importer will occasionally pull in the wrong ingredient quantities. There is no native mobile app, so the phone experience is a responsive web page — perfectly usable in a kitchen, but not as snappy as a real app. The project promotes its own structured recipe format, and entering recipes by hand to that standard takes real time.

How to deploy

• Docker

Getting started

Run it in Docker with the data directory on persistent storage, because both the database and your uploaded images live there. Import a few recipes from well-known cooking sites to see how the parser behaves before importing your whole collection. Create the household accounts and group early — sharing is the point, and retrofitting users later is more disruptive than it sounds. Take the built-in backup regularly; the recipe collection is the kind of data that is genuinely painful to rebuild by hand.

Typical setup

The usual home is a home server or NAS in Docker, with the recipe images and database on persistent storage. Household members each get an account in one group so plans and shopping lists are shared. In practice it works best when paired with a phone shortcut or browser bookmark for quick addition, and with a regular backup, because a recipe collection rebuilt by hand is a very tedious thing to lose.

Who should look elsewhere

Not appropriate if your household will not actually use a shared plan — the value is in the shared calendar and list, and a single user gets less out of it. It is also a poor fit if you live on prepared food or delivery: there is nothing here for someone who does not cook from recipes.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 13,393
• Last code push: 2026-09-30
• Open issues: 151
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.