Why self-host a recipe manager
Cooking blogs mix your recipe with 2,000 words of family history and four rows of ads. SaaS tools like Paprika or Whisk store your data on their servers — and if the subscription disappears, so does your library. Mealie runs in a 200 MB container on your VPS, your recipes live in a local SQLite volume, and you can export them at any time.
What you get
- Import from any URL: Mealie parses JSON-LD Recipe markup and automatically extracts ingredients, steps and images.
- Weekly meal planner with a calendar view to organise your lunches and dinners.
- Shopping list generated from your planned meals, with deduplication and ingredient consolidation.
- Multi-user: each household member has their own account, favourites and notes.
- Open REST API to connect Mealie to your other self-hosted tools (n8n, Home Assistant, cron scripts).
- Built-in backup and restore: export your entire library as JSON or ZIP in one click.
Install Mealie on a ServOrbit VPS
From the ServOrbit Marketplace, select Mealie in the Collaboration & Productivity category and click Install. Provisioning starts a ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:latest container with a persistent data volume. Allow 60 seconds for startup; the first healthcheck on /api/app/about confirms the API is ready.
After launch, log in immediately with [email protected] / MyPassword and change the email address and password in Administration → Your Profile. Do this before sharing access with anyone.
Import your first recipes
Click New Recipe → Import from URL and paste a cooking blog address. Mealie reads the JSON-LD Recipe markup and extracts the title, ingredients list, steps and main photo. For sites without structured markup, it falls back to a scraper. If the result is incomplete, the manual editor lets you fill in missing fields.
Plan the week and generate the shopping list
In Meal Planner, drag your recipes onto the week's slots (breakfast, lunch, dinner). Mealie totals the ingredients across all planned meals, merges duplicates and generates a sorted shopping list. You can tick items off while shopping from your phone.
Share with your household
In Administration → Users, create one account per household member. The user role allows adding and editing recipes; the viewer role gives read-only access. Each user can rate recipes, leave comments and manage their own favourites independently.