Erich Blume 6d7597670e Add plan-a-meal how-to for Mealie cooking timelines

Agent-facing guide for generating unified cooking timelines from
Mealie meal plans. Covers querying the API, picking balanced meals
(protein/carb/vegetable), and interleaving recipe steps into a
relative timeline so everything finishes together.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-03-17 11:07:16 -07:00

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Mealie

Self-hosted recipe manager with a REST API. Part of the meal planning pipeline: Mealie stores categorized recipes, a planner script selects balanced meals, and ollama generates a unified cooking timeline.

Quick Reference

Property	Value
URL	https://meals.ops.eblu.me
Tailscale URL	https://meals.tail8d86e.ts.net
Namespace	`mealie`
Image	`registry.ops.eblu.me/blumeops/mealie` (built from source)
Database	SQLite (local, at `/app/data/`)
API Docs	https://meals.ops.eblu.me/docs
Upstream	https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie
Manifests	`argocd/manifests/mealie/`

Features

Full REST API (FastAPI) for recipe CRUD, filtering by tag/category
Structured recipe data: ingredients (quantity/unit/food), step-by-step instructions
Built-in meal planning and shopping lists
Recipe import from URLs
API token auth for automation
OIDC login via authentik (confidential client)

Authentication

OIDC via authentik using a confidential client. Client secret stored in 1Password (Authentik (blumeops) / mealie-client-secret) and delivered via ExternalSecret. All Authentik users can log in; members of the admins group get Mealie admin privileges via OIDC_ADMIN_GROUP.

Storage

2Gi PVC at /app/data/ via standard storageClassName (minikube-hostpath)
SQLite database (sufficient for single-user)
Recipe images and assets stored alongside the database

Backup

SQLite database backed up via borgmatic's before_backup hook. Borgmatic runs kubectl exec to create a safe .backup copy (via Python's sqlite3 module), then kubectl cp to the host. The dump lands in ~/.local/share/borgmatic/k8s-dumps/mealie.db and is included in both local (sifaka) and offsite (BorgBase) backups.

Networking

Endpoint	Reachable from
`https://meals.ops.eblu.me`	Tailnet clients (via Caddy)
`https://meals.tail8d86e.ts.net`	Tailnet clients
`http://mealie.mealie.svc.cluster.local:9000`	In-cluster

plan-a-meal — Generate unified cooking timelines from meal plans
authentik — OIDC identity provider
ollama — LLM backend for meal timeline generation
borgmatic — Data backup

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