What is Mealie Mcp

Mealie MCP is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service designed for Mealie, a recipe management and meal planning application. It acts as a wrapper around the Mealie API, facilitating interaction between AI assistants and the Mealie instance.

Use cases

Use cases for Mealie MCP include integrating with virtual assistants to provide recipe suggestions, automating meal planning for families, managing shopping lists based on meal plans, and enabling developers to create custom applications that leverage Mealie’s functionalities.

How to use

To use Mealie MCP, first set up the server by downloading the environment configuration and running the Docker container. Configure the necessary environment variables such as MEALIE_URL, MEALIE_USERNAME, and MEALIE_PASSWORD. Then, configure your MCP client to connect to the server.

Key features

Key features of Mealie MCP include recipe management (listing, searching, and retrieving recipes), meal planning management, shopping list management, and the ability to add meal plan recipe ingredients to shopping lists.

Where to use

Mealie MCP can be used in various domains including personal meal planning, recipe management applications, AI assistant integrations, and any scenario where recipe and meal planning data needs to be accessed programmatically.

Mealie MCP

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) service for Mealie, the recipe management and meal planning application.

Warning: This server is undergoing intial development and does not yet implement any sort of authentication. Avoid exposing it on public networks.

Overview

This project provides a MCP wrapper around the Mealie API, allowing AI assistants to interact with your Mealie instance. It enables functionality like:

• Searching and retrieving recipes
• Managing meal plans
• Working with shopping lists
• Adding meal plan recipe ingredients to shopping lists

Usage

Running the MCP Server

curl -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lawndoc/mealie-mcp/refs/heads/main/.env.template
vim .env
docker run -d --rm -p 8000:8000 --env-file .env ghcr.io/lawndoc/mealie-mcp:latest

Client Usage Examples

MCP client config:

Configuration

The application requires the following environment variables:

• MEALIE_URL: The base URL of your Mealie instance (e.g. “https://mealie.yourdomain.com”)
• MEALIE_USERNAME: Your Mealie service account’s username
• MEALIE_PASSWORD: Your Mealie service account’s password

Optional logging configuration:

• MEALIE_MCP_LOG_LEVEL: Controls logging verbosity (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL). Defaults to INFO.
• MEALIE_MCP_LOG_FILE: Optional path to a log file. If not set, logs will only be output to the console.

Example setup:

MEALIE_URL="https://mealie.yourdomain.com"
MEALIE_USERNAME="username" 
MEALIE_PASSWORD="example_password"
MEALIE_MCP_LOG_LEVEL="DEBUG"
MEALIE_MCP_LOG_FILE="/var/log/mealie-mcp.log"

Features

Recipe Management

Tools:

• List all recipes in your Mealie instance
• Get detailed information about specific recipes
• Search recipes by name or ingredients

Meal Planning

Tools:

• List all meals scheduled on the meal plan
• Add a random recipe to a meal in your plan
• Add specific recipes to a meal in your plan

Shopping Lists

Tools:

• List all shopping lists
• Get detailed contents of a specific shopping list
• Add a recipe’s ingredients to a specific shopping list

Development

You must use uv while developing this app.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/lawndoc/mealie-mcp
cd mealie-mcp
uv sync

Technical Details

The project implements a custom HTTPX client wrapper that automatically handles authentication and token refreshing. If a request fails due to an expired token, the client will reauthenticate and retry the request transparently.