Recipe Management Made Easy With Mealie

Nov 2, 2023 by Atulpriya Sharma

Picture this: you stumbled upon a tantalizing recipe while browsing your favorite food blog a few days ago. But you don’t remember where it was. You dig through your browser history, and bookmarks but still don’t find it.

What if there was an app that allowed you to collate all the recipes in one central place? In this blog post, we introduce you to Mealie, a recipe management app that helps you easily manage your recipes. We’ll also show how you can self host Mealie on Acorn. But if you want to just get started quickly, you can deploy Mealie in your Acorn Sandbox now and follow along as you explore the app.

Mealie - Recipe Management Made Easy

Mealie is an open source, self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner designed to make the culinary journey a breeze. With Mealie, you can effortlessly add recipes to your database by sharing a URL, and the application will work its magic, automatically importing all the relevant details. No more hunting for recipes!

It's developer-friendly, boasting robust integrations and third-party application support, a RestAPI backend along with a reactive frontend application built in Vue offering a delightful all-around user experience. So, whether you're a cooking enthusiast or a developer looking for seamless recipe management, Mealie has something special for you.

Features of Mealie

Import Recipes: Import recipes from the web by sharing the URL, and letting Mealie automatically extract and organize all the essential details.
Automatic Backups: Mealie keeps your recipe database secure with automatic backups, ensuring that your culinary creations are never lost.
Simplified Meal Planning: Plan your weekly or monthly meals easily, helping you stay organized and avoid last-minute menu dilemmas.
Enhanced Integration: Leverage Mealie's webhooks to seamlessly connect with third-party applications and services, expanding its functionality and usability.

To learn more about Mealie, its features, and how it works, check out the Mealie documentation.

Deploying Mealie on Acorn

We would be self hosting Mealie on Acorn which is a fully managed developer hosting platform that allows developers to focus on developing and deploying their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Read more about Acorn.

To host Mealie on Acorn, you'll need to have the Acorn CLI properly configured. The CLI serves as your interface for managing both Acorn and your applications. To get started, please refer to our Installation documentation for detailed instructions on installing the Acorn CLI tailored to your specific environment.

Once you have the Acorn CLI in place, the initial step for deploying any application on Acorn involves creating an 'Acornfile.' This file tells Acorn how to build, develop, and run containerized applications. The beauty of authoring an Acornfile lies in its familiarity, as it closely resembles a YAML file structure.

Below, is the Acornfile that we’ve used for this blog post. This file is also available in our repository which you can clone on your system.

services: postgres: {
  image: "ghcr.io/acorn-io/postgres:v15.3-0"
  serviceArgs: {
	dbName: "mealie"
	dbUser: "mealie"
  }
}

containers: {
  mealie: {
	image: "hkotel/mealie:latest"
	env: {
  	"PUID" :"1000"
  	"PGID" :"1000"
  	"TZ" :"America/Anchorage"
  	"DB_ENGINE" :"postgres"
  	"POSTGRES_USER" :"@{services.postgres.secrets.admin.username}"
  	"POSTGRES_PASSWORD" :"@{services.postgres.secrets.admin.password}"
  	"POSTGRES_SERVER" :"@{services.postgres.address}"
  	"POSTGRES_PORT" :"@{services.postgres.port.5432}"
  	"POSTGRES_DB" :"@{services.postgres.data.dbName}"
	}
	dependsOn: ["postgres"]
	ports: publish: "80/http"
  }
}

Let us have a close look at the Acornfile and see what is defined:

Containers: These are the containers that will be deployed for running Mealie. We have a single Mealie container for which we are setting the environment variables returned from the Postgres Acorn service. We are also setting
dbUser
and
dbName
under
serviceArgs
as
mealie
. We are also setting some basic configuration settings. You can refer to their backend configuration document for more.
Services: Services in Acron are external services that your application can utilize. In this case, we are using the Postgres Acorn service.

Read more about Acornfiles and the various components that make up an Acornfile.

To deploy the application to Acorn, first log in to Acorn using the following command:

acorn loginacorn.io

Navigate your browser to https://acorn.io/auth/login?p=pbfld5wf768qc5wjp298hxhngt67b4klzmrlb66jh8vmk4zgct9k2c and login
Gtk-Message: 09:18:16.016: Not loading module "atk-bridge": The functionality is provided by GTK natively. Please try to not load it.
  •  Setting default project to beta.acorn.io/techmaharaj/acorn
  ✔  Login to acorn.io as techmaharaj succeeded

This will open the Acorn portal where you can log in using your GitHub account. Once logged in, the control will return to the terminal and you should have successfully configured Acorn CLI on your system which is now connected to Acorn.

To deploy Mealie on Acorn, navigate to the directory with the Acorn file and execute the following command

acorn run -n mealie .

This will start the deployment process and Mealie will be deployed on Acorn. Acorn will automatically configure Mealie to be accessible on the internet using an Acorn URL.

Navigate to the Acorn portal to see the application

We can see that the Mealie is successfully deployed to Acorn. To access the Mealie, click on the hamburger menu next to the running status.

Use the default credentials to log in to Mealie for the first time. Username: [email protected], Password: MyPassword.

Note: By default, all applications are deployed to Acorn’s Free sandbox mode which allows you to try and run applications for up to 2 hours. If you love Mealie and want to run it longer, you can upgrade your account to Acorn Pro, and run Acorns as long as you want.

Once logged in, you can click the “+” button to add a recipe. Apart from that you can also add recipes from external sources, create a meal plan, and do much more. Explore Mealie and see what it can do for you!

If you also want to try Mealie, follow this link directly to launch the acorn in your sandbox. All you need is a GitHub account and Acorn will spin Mealie instance on Acorn for you to try.

Summary

In this blog post, we introduced Mealie, an open source recipe management app that simplifies the way you organize and plan your recipes. Whether you're an avid home cook or a developer seeking a user-friendly solution, Mealie offers an array of features to enhance your kitchen experience.

Getting started with Mealie is a breeze, and it becomes even more effortless with One-click installation options provided by Acorn. With this seamless integration between Mealie and Acorn, you can effortlessly self host Mealie and import recipes from the web or add your family's cherished creations with ease.

Don't forget to explore other one-click applications in our repository to enhance your digital lifestyle.

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