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Mealie

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping-list app. Import recipes by pasting a URL (it scrapes the page's structured recipe data) or enter them by hand; organize them into cookbooks, plan meals on a calendar, and generate a shopping list from the plan.

Getting Started​

Enable it, then bring the stack up from the repo root:

EXIST_IS_SERVICES_MEALIE=true    # in .env.shared
./existential.sh && docker compose up -d

Signup is disabled (ALLOW_SIGNUP=false) — there's just the one default account mealie creates on first boot:

  • Email: changeme@example.com
  • Password: MyPassword

Log in at https://mealie.<domain> and change both immediately in Settings > User Profile.

AI Recipe Parsing (optional, manual)​

Mealie can use an LLM to parse a recipe from a pasted image, or to transcribe and structure a recipe from a video/audio URL. As of the version this stack ships (v3.23.1), upstream moved this out of environment variables entirely — the whole feature is configured through Admin > AI Providers in the UI and stored per-group in Mealie's own database, not in this service's compose file or .env. There is nothing here for .env.exist.shared's model-role keys to wire into, so this is a manual, one-time step if you want it:

  1. Log in as an admin and go to Admin > AI Providers.
  2. Add a provider pointing at this stack's ollama over Docker DNS:
    • Base URL: http://ollama:11434/v1
    • API key: anything non-empty — ollama doesn't check it (ollama works)
    • Model: whatever this stack's .env.shared currently has for EXIST_MODEL_CHAT (text parsing) or EXIST_MODEL_VISION (image parsing) — both point at the same tag by default
    • Assign it as the Default provider (text) and/or Image provider
  3. The Audio provider role needs an OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint. This stack's ai/whisperx exposes exactly that at http://whisperx:8000/v1 when enabled — untested end-to-end against Mealie's audio-import flow, but worth trying if you want that role filled too.

Because this is UI/DB config rather than an env var, it does not get reset by ./existential.sh or survive a reset — it lives in the mealie_pg_data volume like everything else you enter in the app.