// the take
Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping list app with a FastAPI backend and a Nuxt/Vue frontend. It's for people who want their recipe collection off scattered bookmarks and screenshots and into something searchable, plannable, and shareable with a household — without handing the data to a SaaS.
URL import uses recipe-scrapers to pull structured ingredients/instructions/nutrition straight from a page, which is the actual time-saver over typing recipes by hand. It exposes a documented REST API that third parties already build against (Home Assistant cards, n8n backup workflows, iOS Shortcuts), so the API isn't an afterthought. CI is genuinely taken seriously here: separate backend/frontend test suites, e2e tests, CodeQL, Trivy container scanning, and nightly builds, which is more rigor than most self-hosted projects this size bother with.
Recipe import is only as good as recipe-scrapers' site coverage or a page's schema.org markup — sites that restructure their HTML or skip structured data break import silently, and that shows up as a recurring category of GitHub issues. FastAPI + Postgres/SQLite + Nuxt is a fairly heavy stack for what is mostly CRUD over recipe text, so it's noticeably more RAM-hungry on a Raspberry Pi than something like a plain Flask app would be. Auth has clearly been bolted on over time rather than designed in from the start — there are separate OIDC v1 and v2 docs plus LDAP support, which usually means edge cases in session handling or permission checks that got patched in later rather than planned for. It's AGPL, which is fine for self-hosting but is a real constraint if anyone's hoping to build a hosted product on top of it without open-sourcing their modifications.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →