🍽️ mcp-mealie

An MCP server for Mealie, built for agents rather than for API coverage.

Twenty-five curated tools over recipes, meal plans, cookbooks, and library cleanup, with responses trimmed hard enough that a recipe costs a few hundred tokens instead of a few thousand — and sent once, not in the two copies MCP would otherwise put on the wire.

Works with any MCP client that speaks stdio: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed.

---

🚀 Install

No clone or virtualenv needed — uvx builds it straight from the tag.

{
  "command": "uvx",
  "args": [
    "--from",
    "git+https://github.com/mgummich/mcp-mealie@v0.2.1",
    "mcp-mealie"
  ],
  "env": {
    "MEALIE_URL": "https://mealie.example.com",
    "MEALIE_API_TOKEN": "your-token"
  }
}

Create the token in Mealie under Settings → API Tokens.

[!NOTE] Not on PyPI yet, so installs come from git — uvx mcp-mealie on its own will not resolve. Keep the @v0.2.0 pin: without a tag you get whatever main holds the day uv resolves it.

New to this? The howto (docs/HOWTO.md) walks the whole path in order — token, read-only first session, first writes, and the behaviors that surprise people once. Full docs, including the changelog, live at mgummich.github.io/mcp-mealie.

Claude Code

claude mcp add mealie \
  --env MEALIE_URL=https://mealie.example.com \
  --env MEALIE_API_TOKEN=your-token \
  -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/mgummich/mcp-mealie@v0.2.1 mcp-mealie

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed

Add the JSON block above under mcpServers in the client's config file.

From a local clone

Working on the server itself? Point the client at the checkout and every edit lands on the next restart, no push and no reinstall:

claude mcp add mealie -- uv run --directory /path/to/mcp-mealie mcp-mealie

--directory is what makes uv resolve the project from the checkout rather than from the client's working directory. Credentials can come from the repo's own .env here, so the --env flags are optional.

Updating

uvx caches the revision it first resolved, so a plain restart keeps running the old one. To move to a newer release, change the tag in the command and drop the cached build:

uv cache clean mcp-mealie    # then restart the MCP client

Restart the client after any config change; it only reads the file at startup. Released versions are listed in the changelog.

⚙️ Configuration

Variable	Required	Default	Purpose
MEALIE_URL	✅	—	Base URL of your Mealie instance
MEALIE_API_TOKEN	✅	—	Long-lived API token
MEALIE_READ_ONLY	—	false	Hide every write tool
MEALIE_VERIFY_SSL	—	true	Set false for self-signed certs (homelab only)
MEALIE_LOG_LEVEL	—	INFO	Log verbosity, to stderr

Booleans accept 1/true/yes/on and their negations. An unrecognized value is a startup error rather than a silent false.

These can also live in a .env file in the working directory (or any parent) — copy .env.example to .env and fill it in. Real environment variables always take precedence over the file.

[!NOTE] Requires Mealie 2.0 or newer. The server checks at startup and refuses to run against 1.x, which has no /api/households endpoints.

🧰 Tools

Category	Tools
🥘 Recipes	search_recipes · get_recipe · suggest_recipes · create_recipe · update_recipe · set_recipe_image · upload_recipe_image · bulk_tag_recipes · delete_recipe · import_recipe_from_url
📅 Meal plans	get_meal_plan · get_todays_meals · add_meal_plan_entry · delete_meal_plan_entry · random_meal_plan
📚 Cookbooks	list_cookbooks · get_cookbook_recipes · create_cookbook · update_cookbook · delete_cookbook
📊 Library reports	library_stats · find_duplicate_recipes · check_recipe_links
🔧 Other	parse_ingredients · manage_taxonomy

With MEALIE_READ_ONLY=true, twelve read tools remain.

Once connected, ask in plain language — the agent picks the tools:

💬 What's for dinner this week?

💬 Import https://example.com/that-curry-recipe and tag it "Weeknight".

💬 Plan a random week of dinners, no repeats from last week.

💬 I have "scallion" and "spring onion" as separate foods — merge them.

✨ Things it does for you

• Ingredients as plain text. create_recipe and update_recipe accept ["2 cups flour", "pinch of salt"] and run them through Mealie's parser. Structured objects work too; the two can be mixed. That also makes update_recipe the repair for an import that came back empty, which the import tells you about rather than leaving to be discovered later.
• Tags by name. Mealie's API needs tag objects with a name and a slug. Pass ["Vegan"] and the server resolves or creates it, then tells you which ones were new.
• Updates don't wipe tags. Mealie's PATCH replaces list fields wholesale. update_recipe merges tags, categories, and tools by default; pass replace_tags to overwrite. Renaming a recipe changes its slug — Mealie derives one from the other — so the result hands back the new one.
• Taxonomy cleanup without a script. manage_taxonomy lists (paged, with the total), creates, renames, updates, and deletes foods, units, labels, tags, categories, and tools — and merges duplicate foods or units through Mealie's own merge endpoints, so every recipe that used the loser is repointed.
• A random week is one call. Mealie's random endpoint fills one day per request. random_meal_plan loops for you, capped at 14 days.
• Usage rollups in one call. Mealie has no "how many recipes use this food" endpoint. library_stats("foods") sweeps the library server-side and returns the most-used foods with their counts plus every unused one — the answer to "is this safe to delete" without a search per name.
• Retag a whole shelf at once. bulk_tag_recipes(slugs, tags=["Weeknight"]) files any number of recipes through Mealie's bulk endpoints in one call, creating names that do not exist yet. It only adds; removing still goes through update_recipe with replace_tags.
• Batch taxonomy writes. manage_taxonomy(action="update", items=[...]) runs twenty-five renames in one call, and reports per-item failures instead of stopping at the first bad id.
• Cookbook filters without the syntax. create_cookbook(tags=["Vegan"]) builds the queryFilterString for you, matching your names to Mealie's stored casing. update_cookbook re-filters in place, so the id survives.
• Sweeps without a call per recipe. search_recipes(fields=["slug", "tags"]) projects results the way get_recipe does, so surveying the library is one paged search rather than N follow-up reads.

🛡️ Safety

• MEALIE_READ_ONLY=true prevents write tools from being registered at all.
• delete_recipe requires the slug twice: delete_recipe(slug, confirm_slug).
• Write requests are never retried — Mealie has no idempotency key, and a retried create would duplicate the recipe.

🎓 Agent skill

The workflows the tool list alone doesn't teach — planning a week without repeats, filing an imported recipe, writing cookbook filters, cleaning up a library rollup-first — live in mealie-skill, which detects this server and drives it. It builds for Claude Code, Antigravity, Cursor, and AGENTS.md.

This repository no longer ships its own copy: two skills for one server meant two descriptions in every prompt and two places for the same guidance to drift.

🛠️ Development

uv sync --extra dev             # creates .venv from the committed uv.lock
uv run --extra dev pre-commit install   # run the lint gates on every commit
uv run --extra dev pytest       # unit tests, fully offline
uv run --extra dev ruff check .
uv run --extra dev ruff format .
uv run --extra dev mypy         # type-checks src/

pre-commit run --all-files runs the same gates CI does.

Unit tests run entirely offline: shape.py against captured fixtures, client.py against mocked HTTP.

./scripts/integration.sh     # needs Docker: throwaway Mealie on port 19925

The integration suite spins up a real Mealie in Docker, runs tests/integration/ against it, and tears everything down. scripts/smoke.py hits a live instance of your choosing on demand.

🔗 Related

Knuckles-Team/mealie-mcp takes the opposite approach — it generates 247 tools from Mealie's OpenAPI spec, one per endpoint. Use it if you want complete API coverage. Use this one if you want a small tool list and short responses.

📄 License

MIT