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Mealie Recipe Manager Guide

Learn how to browse, import, and organize recipes with Mealie — your private, collaborative recipe hub.

What is Mealie?

Mealie is your personal recipe collection app. You can browse, upload, or import recipes from websites — all organized with tags, meal plans, and shopping lists. Everything runs locally on our server for privacy and speed.

Think of it as a smarter, self-hosted version of Pinterest meets Paprika.

1 Log In

Visit the Mealie app and log in using your existing account credentials.

Open Mealie

If you don’t have an account yet, contact Bryan to be invited.

2 Add Recipes

You can add new recipes in three ways:

  1. Import from a Website: Copy a recipe URL and paste it into Mealie’s “Import Recipe” form. It automatically scrapes ingredients, steps, and images.
  2. Manual Entry: Click “New Recipe” and fill in your own ingredients, instructions, and notes.
  3. Upload from File: You can also import JSON or Paprika recipe files.

3 Organize Your Recipes

Mealie makes it easy to keep your collection neat and searchable:

Tags help you group recipes by type, cuisine, or dietary needs. Example tags: vegetarian, weeknight, comfort food, summer grill.

Use the meal planner to drag and drop recipes into your weekly schedule. You can create multiple meal plans (like “Weeknight Dinners” or “Meal Prep Sundays”).

Automatically generate shopping lists from selected recipes or meal plans. You can check off ingredients or export lists to your phone.

4 Share and Collaborate

You can share recipes with other users on the server or export them as recipe cards to send to friends.