Deploy and Host Mealie on Railway

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager, meal planner, and shopping list application with a FastAPI RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend built in Vue/Nuxt for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recipes into your database by providing a URL and Mealie will automatically import the relevant data, or add a family recipe using the UI editor. Mealie also provides a comprehensive API and webhooks for interactions with 3rd-party applications.

About Hosting Mealie

This template deploys Mealie backed by a dedicated PostgreSQL database communicating over Railway's private network, along with persistent volumes attached to both services (/app/data for Mealie assets and /var/lib/postgresql/data for Postgres). Using PostgreSQL unlocks Mealie's advanced fuzzy search capabilities and provides improved concurrency over SQLite.

Deployment Tips & Configuration

Default Credentials: The deployment will create a default administrator account with the username changeme@example.com and the password MyPassword. You should log in immediately and follow the setup flow to change the administrator email and password.
Database Networking: Communication with Postgres is done exclusively over the private network and the database is not exposed externally by default. If you want to enable external access, go to the database settings and enable TCP proxying on port 5432. This can be disabled at any time.
Custom Domains: Changing the Railway-provided domain or adding a custom domain may require redeploying the Mealie service so BASE_URL updates properly.
Backups: You can protect your data using Railway's native Volume Backups as well as Mealie's built-in backup and restore utility in the user interface. UI backups can easily be exported and restored on fresh deployments after logging in.
Advanced Configuration: A complete list of supported environment variables can be found in the Mealie documentation. These can be added to the Mealie service to enable support for SMTP email, OpenAI integration (for recipe scraping and image parsing), LDAP, and/or OpenID Connect (OIDC).

Note: This is a community-made template and therefore not officially supported by the Mealie team. Please direct template-specific help requests to the Railway thread for the template.

Common Use Cases

Automated Recipe Web Scraping: Import recipes from thousands of cooking websites via URL with automatic extraction of ingredients, instructions, nutrition facts, and images—plus optional OpenAI integration for parsing complex sites or photos of physical recipe cards.
Household Meal Planning & Grocery Lists: Collaboratively build weekly or monthly meal plans across breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and automatically generate consolidated, categorized shopping lists.
Digital Family Cookbook: Organize recipes using categories, tags, tools, and custom cookbooks while sharing access across a household or group with role-based permissions.
Smart Home & API Integration: Leverage Mealie's built-in REST API, Swagger documentation, and scheduled webhooks to sync meal plans and shopping lists with platforms like Home Assistant or third-party mobile apps.

Dependencies for Mealie Hosting

Mealie (ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:latest): The core web application and API server, configured with a persistent volume mounted at /app/data.
PostgreSQL (ghcr.io/railwayapp-templates/postgres-ssl:latest): Relational database storing recipes, users, and metadata, configured with a persistent volume mounted at /var/lib/postgresql/data.

Deployment Dependencies

Why Deploy Mealie on Railway?

Deploying Mealie on Railway sets up the application, PostgreSQL database, persistent volumes, and private networking in a single click. You get immediate HTTPS access to your recipes from anywhere without having to manage a local server, Docker Compose files, or reverse proxies.