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Mealie

Mealie is a self hosting recipe manager and meal planner. You can import recipes from your favorite cooking blogs or websites.

WARNING The instructions I have posted are probably not best practice.

Why Mealie

I chose Mealie over the competition, because it was quite simple to setup. Originally, setting up Mealie required pulling and configuring one container.

podman run --name mealie
    -p 9925:80
    -v /srv/mealie/data:/app/data:Z
    hkotel/mealie:latest

It was that simple. With version 1.0 beta, that is no longer true.

Version 1.0.0 Beta

Version 1.0.0 beta has split Mealie into two containers, a frontend and an api container.

You can use Mealie's preferred method, docker-compose. I prefer using a shell script or podman pods yaml file over docker-compose. Just a personal preference, and with just a little work, it is easy to get Mealie 1.0.0 Beta to play nice with podman.

I must confess, initially I had a problem getting Mealie 1.0 working in podman. I never figured out exactly what all the issues were. One issue was PUID and PGID, do not use environmental variables PUID or PGID, podman runs in userspace anyways. I set the timezone, using podmans --tz=local flag. If you have problems, you can use environmental variable TZ= instead.

If you have SELinux enabled, Use z and not Z, both containers need read/write permission to the same volume. My example below assumes SELinux is enabled on your system.

Creating the Mealie Pod

These instructions should work with Podman 3.4.7 and up. There have been some changes to Podman 4.0 that I will not go into here.

Rather than run the containers like most examples, I create the containers first. I see less issues this way.

First create the pod

podman pod create --name mealie -p 9925:3000

The mealie-api container. Change BASE_URL to your dns address if you have one. You can change ALLOW_SIGNUP to false, if you like.

podman container create --name mealie-api --pod mealie
  --replace
    -v /srv/mealie/data:/app/data:z
    -e ALLOW_SIGNUP=true
    -e MAX_WORKERS=1
    -e WEB_CONCURRENCY=1
    --tz=local
    -e BASE_URL=http://mealie.foo.com
    hkotel/mealie:api-v1.0.0beta-5

podman container create --name mealie-frontend --pod mealie
  --replace
    -v /srv/mealie/data:/app/data:z
    -e API_URL=http://mealie-api:9000
    hkotel/mealie:frontend-v1.0.0beta-5

start the pod:

podman pod start mealie

If everything is working, you should be able to access Mealier from localhost:9925.

Using systemd to manage Mealie pod

If everything is working, we can generate the systemd service file to manage the startup and shutdown of Mealie.

If you have not done so already, create:

mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user

and stop the Mealie Pod

podman pod stop mealie

Next, generate the systemd service file:

podman generate systemd --name mealie --file ~/.config/systemd/user/

This should create pod-mealie.service, container-mealie-api.service and container-mealie-frontend.service in ~/.config/systemd/user.

We need to reload systemd so it can see the new service files.

systemctl --user daemon-reload

Then start Mealie pod through systemd. pod-mealie.service will start the container-mealie-api.service and container-mealie-frontend.service

systemctl --user start pod-mealie

Go to localhost:9925. If everything is working we can enable Mealie to start up on boot.

systemctl --user enable pod-mealie

Updating Mealie Beta

Right now, there is no

tag in the 1.0.0. beta release. Each time Mealie makes a new release available, you will need to manually edit the containers your pod uses. So far, all it has required is changing hkotel/mealie:api-v1.0.0beta-4 to hkotel/mealie:api-v1.0.0beta-5 in the shell script.