🍽️ mcp-mealie

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

Forty-three curated tools over recipes, meal plans, shopping lists, cooking history, 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@v0.4.0",
    "mcp-mealie"
  ],
  "env": {
    "MEALIE_URL": "https://mealie.example.com",
    "MEALIE_API_TOKEN": "your-token"
  }
}

Create the token in Mealie under Profile → API Tokens.

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@v0.4.0 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.

Related MCP server: Mealie MCP Server

⚙️ Configuration

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.

🧰 Tools

With MEALIE_READ_ONLY=true, seventeen 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.

• A recipe Mealie chokes on still deletes. Some rows make Mealie's own delete answer 500. delete_recipe falls back to the bulk endpoint, which gets through, and says so in the result. A typo'd slug still fails.

🛡️ Safety

• MEALIE_READ_ONLY=true prevents write tools from being registered at all.

• delete_recipe requires the slug twice: delete_recipe(slug, confirm_slug). delete_shopping_list asks for its id twice the same way.

• Write requests are never retried — Mealie has no idempotency key, and a retried create would duplicate the recipe.

• One semaphore caps how many requests reach Mealie at once, shared by every tool call, so a fan-out inside one tool and ten parallel tool calls add up to the same ceiling rather than multiplying.

🎓 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 pytest    # unit tests, fully offline

CONTRIBUTING.md is the whole developer path — setup, gates, integration tests, adding a tool, which docs to update. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md is the technical truth: module boundaries, the tool-to-Mealie flow, caches, write semantics, and what this deliberately does not expose.

🔗 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