What is Mealie?

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe management application. You run it on your own server or computer, and it gives you a central place to store, organize, and retrieve recipes for yourself or your household. It fits people who want their recipe collection on infrastructure they control rather than inside a third-party cloud service. The project's documentation covers installation, a feature overview, importing from other apps, and the technology stack, so you can evaluate it before committing.

What problem it solves

Most recipe collections end up scattered: browser bookmarks, screenshots, notes apps, email to yourself, and a few sites you keep revisiting. Mealie consolidates that into one searchable library you host yourself. Instead of depending on a vendor's account and uptime, you keep the data and decide who can access it.

Core capabilities

Based on the documentation's feature overview and usage sections, Mealie is built around:

• A centralized recipe library — save and organize recipes in one place rather than across scattered tools.
• Import from other apps — the docs include a dedicated "Import from other apps" path, so migrating an existing collection is a first-class concern.
• Backup and restore — documented under Usage, which matters when you are the one responsible for the data.
• Permissions and public access — you can control who sees what, including making parts public.
• Authentication options — the docs cover LDAP and OpenID Connect, which is relevant if you want to integrate with existing accounts.
• API access — an API reference is provided, enabling automation and integrations.

How it is deployed

Mealie is self-hosted, and the installation docs give you a choice of database:

The installation section also includes a checklist, backend configuration, security, and logging topics. In practice this means you need somewhere to run the app — a home server, a NAS, a VPS, or similar — and you follow the installation checklist rather than a one-click signup.

When Mealie is a good fit

Choose Mealie if:

• You want your recipes stored on hardware you control.
• You are comfortable running and maintaining a self-hosted service.
• You want household-level sharing with permission controls.
• You may want to integrate with existing authentication (LDAP, OpenID Connect) or automate via the API.

Look elsewhere if you want a zero-maintenance hosted service with no server to run, or if you have no interest in managing backups and updates yourself.

Getting oriented

The documentation is organized so you can move in a sensible order:

1. Getting Started → Introduction / Features — understand what the app does.
2. Installation — pick SQLite (recommended) or PostgreSQL and work through the checklist.
3. Usage — learn backup/restore, permissions, and public access.
4. Authentication — set up LDAP or OpenID Connect if you need it.
5. Community Guides — practical recipes such as automating backups with n8n, bulk URL import, Home Assistant import, and reverse proxy setups.

There is also a migration guide and a version 1 migration page, which is worth checking if you are coming from an older Mealie release or another tool.