Deploying Mealie Recipe Manager on Fly.io

[Ravio1i]

Deploying Mealie Recipe Manager on Fly.io

Today, I'm excited to share my journey with Mealie, a fantastic recipe manager that has become an indispensable part of my digital kitchen. As someone who travels frequently, finding a reliable, cost-effective solution to access my collection of recipes from anywhere was essential. This led me to deploy Mealie on Fly.io (I'm not getting paid by them 😆), a cloud hosting platform that has offered me a seamless, budget-friendly hosting solution. Let's dive into the process and how you can do it too!

Deployment

Deploying Mealie on Fly.io is a breeze. With a simple Fly configuration that utilizes the Mealie Docker image, I set up the necessary environment variables without hassle. For those looking to deploy, here's how you can start.

You can either create or let it generate you the fly.toml. Using the fly.io getting started you can then run fly launch. Here is an example with mounts so you can ensure that the data is not lost.

app = '<your-mealie-app-name>'
primary_region = 'ams'

[env]
  ALLOW_SIGNUP = 'false'
  BASE_URL = 'https://<your-mealie-app-name>.fly.dev'
  MAX_WORKERS = '1'
  PGID = '1000'
  PUID = '1000'
  TZ = 'Europe/Berlin'
  WEB_CONCURRENCY = '1'
  SMTP_HOST = "smtp.gmail.com"
  SMTP_PORT = "465"
  SMTP_AUTH_STRATEGY = "SSL"

[[mounts]]
  source = 'mealie'
  destination = '/app/data'

[http_service]
  internal_port = 9000
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 0
  processes = ['app']

[[vm]]
  memory = '1gb'
  cpu_kind = 'shared'
  cpus = 1

Use the command below to deploy the Mealie recipe manager using the specified Docker image from the GitHub Container Registry.

fly deploy --image ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:v1.4.0

Secrets

Mealie requires certain secrets, e.g for the SMTP server configuration or OIDC. You can set these easily through the fly secrets command or via the Fly web interface. My secrets included:

• SMTP_USER
• SMTP_PASSWORD
• SMTP_FROM_EMAIL
• SMTP_FROM_NAME

Notably, in my case the SMTP password is an app-specific password, which you can manage through your Google account settings for enhanced security.

Updates

When a new version of Mealie is released, simply update the image tag to the new version and redeploy using the same command. Fly.io conveniently uses a canary deployment strategy by default, ensuring smooth transitions between versions.

fly deploy --image ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:<someotherversion>

[hjhart]

This is hugely useful! I managed to deploy this by only changing the app name. I did not need to specify SMTP env variables -- I don't expect to utilize any email sending features so hopefully that doesn't cause errors later on.

I will say, I barely found this discussion - it might be helpful to write up some deployment strategies for different providers and put that in the documentation for mealie somewhere.

For future users, You can see which version to install currently by navigating here and selecting the most recent version, e.g.

fly deploy --image ghcr.io/mealie-recipes/mealie:v1.11.0

[vinidf]

Hi, thanks for sharing that! Can you share the estimated monthly cost for that instance?

[hjhart]

Looks like about $5.70 for the shared-cpu-1x@1gb, but I think it's cheaper for hobby tier.

https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/

[Ravio1i]

Hey @vinidf

You have to add an initial $5.00 to your account for a hobby account. After having mealie with shared-cpu-1 deployed now for 4 months, I'm at $3.49 left.

[vinidf]

Thank you folks, I'll check that out