Self-Host Mealie with Greffon
Your recipe collection is the kind of thing you want to keep for decades. That is a poor fit for a service that might shut down. Here is the honest setup for Mealie on a greffer.
A recipe collection is a slow archive. You add to it for years, and the whole point is that it is still there a decade from now. That makes it a bad thing to leave on a free web service that can pivot, paywall, or shut down. Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner, and grafting it onto a greffer keeps that archive on hardware you own.
Why own your recipes
Mealie does the things a recipe app should: it imports a recipe by URL and strips out the life story above the ingredients, it stores your own recipes, it plans meals on a calendar, and it builds shopping lists. It is a normal web app, so any device on the network opens it in a browser with no special client to install.
Self-hosting it means the recipes you have collected and the photos you have taken live in your own database, not an account you rent. Nobody rate-limits your imports or decides meal planning is now a paid tier.
Graft it from the catalog
On a greffer you do not hand-write a compose file or wire a reverse proxy. Pick Mealie from the catalog and graft it onto your greffer. Greffon issues the certificate and routes the app, so it comes up reachable over HTTPS without you assembling that plumbing by hand.
Mealie needs to know its own public address so links and imported images resolve correctly. The catalog sets BASE_URL to the instance URL Greffon assigns, so for a normal graft you do not have to touch it. It is there under advanced settings if you put the greffon behind a custom domain later.
Change the default login
[email protected] / MyPassword. Anyone who finds the URL knows that pair too. Log in once, then change the email and password immediately from the user settings before you put anything real in. Do this even on a greffer that is not yet reachable from the internet.This is the one sharp edge that is easy to skip and expensive to ignore. The default credentials are documented publicly, so a Mealie left on them is effectively open. Changing them is the first thing to do after the greffon starts, not a later cleanup task.
Reach it from the kitchen
A recipe app earns its keep when it is open on a phone propped against the backsplash. On the same network as your greffer that works the moment it starts. To reach it from anywhere else, you have two honest options.
The simplest is tunnel mode: a greffer connects outbound to the manager's tunnel and serves its apps without opening a single inbound port, which is the answer for a box behind NAT or CGNAT with no public IP. Mealie is a plain HTTP app, so the tunnel carries it without a caveat. If you would rather expose the greffer directly, port forwarding plus dynamic DNS also works. Either way the app stays reachable over HTTPS.
Storage and backups
Mealie is light on memory and CPU, so it runs comfortably on a modest greffer. The thing that grows is storage: recipe images and any photos you attach accumulate over years. It is not a lot per recipe, but plan for the data directory to keep climbing rather than stay flat.
That data directory is also the only thing you cannot regenerate. Lose it and you lose the archive. Greffon handles TLS and routing today, and native one-click backups are coming in M2. Until then, bring your own backup tool (restic or borgbackup are the usual choices), back up the Mealie data on a schedule, and keep a copy off the greffer.
Keep it always-on
You will reach for it mid-cook, when meal planning on a Sunday, or from a shop with the shopping list open, so it needs to be up when you are. Run it on an always-on greffer, a small VPS, a mini-PC, or a free Oracle Cloud box, rather than a laptop that sleeps. The Oracle walkthrough is a good place to get a greffer running before you graft Mealie onto it.
