Mealie

Powers Meals. Mealie is a separate self-hosted recipe manager / meal planner — it isn't part of this repo, and this app never authors recipes, it only reads and links into Mealie's own data.

Setup

MEALIE_URL=    # base URL of your Mealie instance
MEALIE_TOKEN=  # Mealie → Settings → API Tokens → create a long-lived token

If Mealie runs as a sibling container on the same Docker host, use http://host.docker.internal:<port> — localhost won't resolve to a sibling container from inside this app's own container.

Companion-app shortcut

The companion PWA can show a Meals ↗ tab that opens your Mealie app directly, so phones don't need a second home-screen icon. It's a launcher, not an embed — tapping it hands off to Mealie's own web app (with its own login).

MEALIE_APP_URL=  # HTTPS URL your phone reaches Mealie at; blank hides the tab

This is a separate value from MEALIE_URL and serves a different purpose:

Variable	Used by	Reachable from
MEALIE_URL	the server, to proxy recipe data/thumbnails	inside this app's container
MEALIE_APP_URL	the phone, as the Meals tab's link target	the phone's browser

Because the phone opens it directly, MEALIE_APP_URL must be an address the phone can reach — a plain LAN URL won't work off the home network. The usual setup is an HTTPS Tailscale URL: run tailscale serve --https=443 http://localhost:<mealie-port> on the Mealie host and use the resulting https://<host>.<tailnet>.ts.net/. It's only ever a URL (never a token), so it's safe to expose to the client via /api/config. Leave it blank and the tab simply doesn't appear.

Groceries

Groceries are Mealie's shopping list, not a separate list — a household is assumed to have exactly one active shopping list. "Add to grocery list" (from a recipe) writes directly into Mealie, so it shows up in Mealie's own app too.

Recipe images

Thumbnails are proxied and cached to a local, gitignored directory (data/mealie-img/) rather than fetched full-resolution on every request — keeps the weekly meal grid fast even with dozens of thumbnails on modest hardware.