What is mealie-mcp?

mealie-mcp is a Model Context Protocol server for Mealie, the self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner. It gives a model a curated view of a Mealie instance: search and read recipes with their ingredients and steps, import new ones from a website, keep tags and categories tidy, plan meals, build shopping lists from those plans, and record what was actually cooked.

Why

Mealie's REST API has 259 operations across 175 paths. Exposing all of them to a model would bury the useful calls under administrative noise — and hand the model routes nobody wants it to have, like backups, user management and API-token minting.

This server exposes 53 tools instead, chosen so that the common tasks are one call and the dangerous surface is not reachable at all:

• Common tasks are one call. import_recipe_from_url imports a recipe and returns the full result, add_recipe_to_shopping_list merges a recipe's ingredients into a list, get_todays_meals answers the obvious daily question. Recipes can be addressed by slug or by UUID everywhere — Mealie splits its identifier space between the two, and the tools resolve whichever they are given.
• The dangerous surface is unreachable. Everything under /api/admin, the token-minting route, authentication, webhooks and other outbound-HTTP triggers are simply not exposed — see Security.
• Destructive calls ask a person. Deletes, merges and share links raise a real dialog through MCP elicitation — see Asking a person — and fall back to a server-issued token, which a model cannot fabricate, where the client cannot show one.

The server is verified against Mealie v3.28.0. The source of truth for every request shape is the GET /openapi.json of a running instance, not the published documentation, which is out of date in several places.

What it is not

• Not an admin tool. Backups, restore, user, group and household management, email and AI-provider settings are deliberately out of reach. Use Mealie's own web UI for those.
• Not a Mealie client library. The tools are shaped for a model's workflow, not as a 1:1 API mapping — several tools combine multiple API calls, and responses are trimmed and bounded so they fit a context window.
• Not a hosted service. It is a local stdio process started by your MCP client, talking to your Mealie instance with your token.