The lightest self-hosted recipe manager that actually cares about your food memories.
Other recipe apps store recipes. Zest stores the moments around the table.
Try Zest live → · Website · Documentation
Every recipe manager out there treats food like data: title, ingredients, steps, done. But cooking is more than that. It's the Sunday your daughter helped you make pasta for the first time. The improvised dinner that became a family legend. The photo your partner took while you weren't looking.
Zest is a culinary diary — recipes + memories + beautiful shareable cards, all running on your own hardware in a single container. No cloud, no subscriptions, no telemetry. Just your food story, owned by you.
- Memories — Attach photos, dates, locations, and stories to any recipe. Build a timeline of your cooking life.
- Moment Cards — Generate gorgeous shareable images (Instagram Stories, square, landscape) from your memories with one click.
- Cookbooks — Curate collections and share them via public links or export as beautiful PDFs.
- "What to Cook?" — Tell Zest what ingredients you have, it tells you what you can make.
- 4-Tier Recipe Scraper — Paste any URL. Zest tries recipe-scrapers, JSON-LD, Microdata, then HTML heuristics. It will find the recipe.
- Dead simple to run — One
docker compose up. SQLite. No Postgres, no Redis, no external services.
| Feature | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 🍳 | Full Recipe CRUD | Create, edit, search, filter, rate, favorite. Categories and color-coded tags. |
| 🌐 | URL Import | Paste a link from any cooking site. 4-tier scraping handles even the worst recipe blogs. |
| 📸 | Memories | Photo diary entries linked to recipes. EXIF support, GPS metadata, multi-photo upload. |
| 🎴 | Moment Cards | Auto-generated social cards (1080×1080, 1080×1920, 1200×630) from your memories. |
| 📚 | Cookbooks | Curated collections with custom covers. Share via link or export as PDF. |
| 🔗 | Sharing | Public links for cookbooks. Recipients don't need an account. |
| 🛒 | Shopping List | Add ingredients from any recipe, scaled to your portions. Combine multiple recipes. |
| ⚖️ | Portion Calculator | Scale any recipe from 1 to 100 servings. Fractions displayed beautifully (½, ¼, ⅓). |
| 👨🍳 | Cooking Mode | Full-screen step-by-step with auto-detected timers, Wake Lock, and ingredient panel. |
| 🔍 | "What to Cook?" | Enter available ingredients → get ranked recipe suggestions with missing item counts. |
| 📄 | PDF Export | Professional cookbook PDFs with cover page, recipe cards, and proper typography. |
| 💾 | Automatic Backups | Scheduled database + image backups. Manual export/import. Full disaster recovery. |
| 🌙 | Dark Mode | Full dark theme. Respects your preference. |
| 📱 | Mobile Friendly | Responsive design for desktop and mobile. |
| 🔒 | Auth + Rate Limiting | JWT auth, bcrypt passwords, rate-limited endpoints. |
| 🍎 | iPhone Photos | HEIC/HEIF support out of the box. |
git clone https://github.com/MartinSantosT/myzest.git
cd myzest
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -dOpen http://localhost:8000 and that's it. First-time setup takes about 30 seconds.
First launch: Register your account — the first user becomes admin and gets 12 example recipes with photos to explore.
python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe(32))"Paste the result in your .env file:
ZEST_SECRET_KEY=your-generated-secret-herezest/
├── app/
│ ├── main.py # FastAPI application (all endpoints)
│ ├── models.py # SQLAlchemy models
│ ├── schemas.py # Pydantic schemas
│ ├── database.py # Database connection
│ ├── scrapers.py # 4-tier recipe scraping engine
│ ├── card_generator.py # Pillow-based moment card generator
│ └── static/
│ ├── index.html # SPA frontend
│ ├── shared.html # Public cookbook viewer
│ └── js/ # 26 ES modules
│ ├── app.js # Module orchestrator
│ ├── api.js # API client
│ ├── recipes.js # Recipe management
│ ├── memories.js # Culinary diary
│ ├── cookbooks.js # Collections
│ ├── shoppingList.js
│ ├── calculator.js
│ ├── whatToCook.js
│ └── ... # 18 more modules
├── tests/ # pytest test suite
├── data/ # SQLite database + backups (volume-mounted)
├── Dockerfile
├── docker-compose.yml
├── requirements.txt
└── .env.example
Stack: FastAPI · SQLAlchemy · SQLite · Pillow · ReportLab · Vanilla JS (ES Modules) · Tailwind CSS
No frontend build step. No webpack. No node_modules. The frontend is a single HTML file with 26 ES modules loaded natively by the browser.
All configuration is done through environment variables in .env:
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
ZEST_SECRET_KEY |
zest-change-this-secret-in-production |
JWT signing key. Change this. |
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
./data:/app/data |
Database, backups, exports |
./app:/app/app |
Application code (enables hot reload in dev) |
Default port is 8000. Change it in docker-compose.yml:
ports:
- "3000:8000" # Access on port 3000cd myzest
git pull
docker compose build
docker compose down && docker compose up -dZest handles database migrations automatically on startup.
Zest includes a built-in backup system accessible from Settings → Backups:
- Automatic backups — Configure frequency (12h / 24h / 7 days) and retention count
- Manual backups — One-click database + images export as
.zip - Import/Export — Move your data between instances or restore from backup
- JSON export — Export recipes as portable JSON for interoperability
Backups are stored in ./data/backups/ on the host.
docker exec zest_backend pytest tests/ -vExample Nginx config for exposing Zest with HTTPS:
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name zest.example.com; # e.g. myzest.app
ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.pem;
client_max_body_size 20M;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
}Works great behind Caddy, Traefik, or Nginx Proxy Manager too.
curl http://localhost:8000/api/health
# {"status": "healthy", "recipes": 42, "users": 1}Perfect for Uptime Kuma, Healthchecks.io, or any monitoring tool.
- Recipe scraping uses a 4-tier fallback:
recipe-scraperslibrary (400+ sites) → JSON-LD structured data → Microdata attributes → CSS heuristic selectors. If a recipe exists on the page, Zest will find it. - Moment Cards are generated server-side with Pillow. No external APIs, no Canvas tricks. Pure Python image generation with gradient overlays, typography, and branding.
- PDF export uses ReportLab with DejaVu fonts (bundled in the Docker image) for proper Unicode support.
- Auth uses bcrypt with automatic legacy hash migration. Rate limiting via slowapi on sensitive endpoints.
- Frontend is a true SPA built with vanilla JavaScript ES modules. Zero dependencies. Zero build tools. Fast.
- Image processing automatically resizes uploads to max 1920px, converts HEIC to JPEG, and preserves EXIF metadata.
Found a bug or have a feature idea? Open an issue or submit a PR — contributions are welcome.
MIT — do whatever you want with it.
🍊 Zest — Because recipes deserve memories.