Normally, I just have a folder in my bookmarks with recipes that I want to make. Sometimes, I actually get around to making them. What bugs me the most about almost every online recipe that I look at is the constant ads and 300 page novel I have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe. Then, I stumbled across Mealie and thought it looked pretty nice and might give me the motivation to copy recipes over to my own easy-to-use self-hosted area.
Installation was very easy as I used a docker compose from their website. Make sure you change the domain (BASE_URL).
Docker Compose
services:
mealie:
image: ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:v1.7.0 #
container_name: mealie
restart: always
ports:
- "9925:9000" #
deploy:
resources:
limits:
memory: 1000M #
volumes:
- mealie-data:/app/data/
environment:
# Set Backend ENV Variables Here
ALLOW_SIGNUP: true
PUID: 1000
PGID: 1000
TZ: America/Anchorage
MAX_WORKERS: 1
WEB_CONCURRENCY: 1
BASE_URL: https://mealie.yourdomain.com
volumes:
mealie-data:
Once installed the default login is [email protected] (user) and MyPassword (pass).
Post Install
When you get logged in, you will see something like this but it will be blank. I’ve already been testing it out for a bit, before writing this review.
Here’s an example of what it looks like when you actually click on a recipe from the main screen. As you can see, ingredients and instructions are neatly listed as well as prep time and cook time. Sometimes when you import a recipe from a website it will have a hard time parsing it correctly so it’s cook to look over everything after importing to make sure you aren’t missing any important details.
If you don’t want to import recipes and wish to add them manually. Here’s a quick video of how that looks.
Conclusion
That’s pretty easy, huh? You can pick what you want for each day or you can click the random button and it will decide for you. That’s a pretty neat option for me since I’m not always too picky.
The shopping list feature gets pretty in-depth with creating labels, adding items and creating multiple lists in case you might shop at different places. I won’t go through that in a video because it would be so long you’d fall asleep halfway in.
There are also options to search, in case your recipe list gets so large you can’t find the mac and cheese your grandma used to make. You can also add categories and tools such as pots, pans, and utensils that are needed for a specific recipe.
The best thing about this app? It has a dark mode! So, go spin this thing up and stop wasting your life scrolling through someone’s personal life story just so you can see how to make pork fried rice.