mealie-mcp

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Mealie, the self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner and shopping-list app.

It exposes every endpoint of the Mealie REST API as an MCP tool, so an LLM (Claude, etc.) can read and manage your recipes, meal plans, shopping lists, cookbooks, households, users and more.

• 🧩 Complete API coverage — one tool per Mealie endpoint (~259 tools).

• 🔄 Auto-adapts to your Mealie version — on startup it fetches the OpenAPI schema from your instance, so the tools always match exactly what your server supports. A bundled snapshot is used as a fallback if the fetch fails.

• 🚀 Zero install — runs straight from npx, ideal for MCPHub, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any other MCP client.

• 🔒 Safe by default options — read-only mode and per-category include/exclude filtering for clients that prefer fewer tools.

Quick start

You need two things:

1. The base URL of your Mealie instance, e.g. https://mealie.example.com

2. A Mealie API token (see Getting an API token)

Run it with npx:

MEALIE_BASE_URL="https://mealie.example.com" \
MEALIE_API_TOKEN="your-long-lived-token" \
npx -y mealie-mcp

The server speaks MCP over stdio, so you normally won't run it by hand — your MCP client launches it for you using the config below.

Related MCP server: Mealie MCP Server

Client configuration

MCPHub / Claude Desktop / Cursor (generic MCP config)

Add an entry to your client's MCP servers config (for Claude Desktop this is claude_desktop_config.json; MCPHub uses an equivalent mcpServers block):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mealie": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mealie-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "MEALIE_BASE_URL": "https://mealie.example.com",
        "MEALIE_API_TOKEN": "your-long-lived-token"
      }
    }
  }
}

That's the only required configuration. Everything else is optional tuning.

Getting an API token

In Mealie:

1. Click your user avatar → Manage Your Profile.

2. Open the API Tokens section (/user/profile/api-tokens).

3. Create a token, give it a name, and copy it.

The token inherits the permissions of the user that created it, so create it under a user/household with the access you want the LLM to have. To give the model read-only-ish safety, also see MEALIE_READ_ONLY.

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables.

Reducing the number of tools

Mealie has ~259 endpoints. Some MCP clients work better with fewer tools. Use MEALIE_TOOLS / MEALIE_EXCLUDE_TOOLS with category prefixes (the part before the verb in a tool name) to narrow things down. Examples:

# Only recipes, meal plans and shopping lists:
MEALIE_TOOLS="recipe,households_mealplans,households_shopping"

# Everything except admin + group seeders:
MEALIE_EXCLUDE_TOOLS="admin,groups_seeders,groups_migrations"

# Read-only recipe browsing assistant:
MEALIE_READ_ONLY=true
MEALIE_TOOLS="recipe,explore"

How tools are named

Each tool name is derived from the Mealie OpenAPI tag (category) and operation. Uniquely-named operations use their bare operation name (e.g. suggest_recipes); operations whose name is reused across resources (the CRUD verbs get_all, get_one, create_one, update_one, delete_one, …) are prefixed with their category to stay unique and to keep them grouped. All names are kept well under the 64-character tool-name limit. For example:

Each tool's input schema declares its path parameters, query parameters and (where relevant) a body object — all generated directly from Mealie's OpenAPI schema, so the model gets accurate, fully-typed arguments.

File uploads

Endpoints that upload files (recipe images, ZIP imports, backups, assets, …) take their file fields as absolute paths to local files, which the server reads and sends as multipart form data. The tool description tells the model which fields are file paths.

Troubleshooting: "name: String should have at most 64 characters"

Some MCP clients/hubs (e.g. MCPHub, remote connectors) prefix every tool name with the server name — mcp__<server>__<tool> — and the combined string must stay within the API's 64-character limit. If you hit this error:

1. Keep the server's name/alias short (mealie is ideal).

2. Lower the tool-name cap, e.g. MEALIE_TOOL_NAME_MAX=30, until it fits.

3. The error is global — Claude rejects the whole tool list if any tool (from any server) is too long, so the culprit may be a different server.

Categories

Development

git clone https://github.com/2fst4u/mealie-mcp.git
cd mealie-mcp
npm install

npm run build       # compile TypeScript to dist/
npm test            # run the test suite (node:test)
npm run typecheck   # type-check without emitting

# Run from source against a Mealie instance:
MEALIE_BASE_URL="https://demo.mealie.io" npm run dev

Updating the bundled OpenAPI snapshot

The server prefers the live schema from your own instance, but the bundled snapshot (used as a fallback) can be refreshed from any Mealie instance:

npm run refresh-spec -- https://demo.mealie.io

Project layout

Releases & publishing

This repo ships two GitHub Actions workflows:

• CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) — runs type-check, build and tests on every pull request (and on non-main branch pushes) across Node 18/20/22.

• Release (.github/workflows/release.yml) — on every push/merge to main, builds and tests, then creates a GitHub Release v<version> (with auto-generated notes) and publishes to npm if that version hasn't been released yet. To cut a release, bump version in package.json in your PR; merging it ships the release.

Publishing to npm (Trusted Publishing / OIDC)

The release workflow publishes via npm Trusted Publishing, so there is no NPM_TOKEN secret to store — GitHub Actions authenticates to npm with a short-lived OIDC token, and npm generates build provenance automatically.

npm requires a package to exist before you can attach a Trusted Publisher, so there is a one-time bootstrap for the first ever publish:

1. Publish the first version manually from your machine (this also claims the package name):

   npm install            # ensure deps
   npm login              # your normal npm account + 2FA
   npm publish --access public

2. Configure the Trusted Publisher on npmjs.com: open the package page → Settings → Trusted Publisher → GitHub Actions, and enter:

   • Organization or user: 2fst4u

   • Repository: mealie-mcp

   • Workflow filename: release.yml

   • Environment: (leave blank)

3. From then on, every merge to main with a bumped version publishes automatically over OIDC — no tokens, no manual steps.

Requirements (handled by the workflow): id-token: write permission, Node ≥ 22.14, and npm ≥ 11.5.1. The publish step safely skips if the version is already on npm, so re-runs and the bootstrap version won't cause failures.

License

MIT

This project is an independent client for Mealie and is not affiliated with the Mealie project.