How to Self-Host Tandoor Recipes 2026

TL;DR

Tandoor Recipes (MIT, ~5K GitHub stars, Python/Vue) is a feature-rich self-hosted recipe manager. It imports recipes from any URL (Allrecipes, NYT Cooking, The Guardian, etc.), tracks nutrition, plans meals on a weekly calendar, and generates shopping lists from your meal plan. Recipe services like Paprika 3 charge $4.99 one-time but sync to cloud; Whisk and Mealime use subscriptions. Tandoor is free, self-hosted, and has a strong REST API for automation.

Key Takeaways

Tandoor: MIT, ~5K stars, Python/Vue — recipe import, nutrition, meal planning, shopping lists
URL import: Scrapes recipe sites automatically (Allrecipes, NYT Cooking, BBC Food, etc.)
Nutrition tracking: Automatic nutrition facts via built-in Open Food Facts integration
Meal planner: Weekly view, drag-and-drop recipes to days, generate shopping lists
Shopping lists: Auto-combine ingredients from multiple recipes, group by supermarket aisle
REST API: Full API for integration with Home Assistant, Grocy, other tools

Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: djangodb
      POSTGRES_USER: djangouser
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U djangouser"]
      interval: 10s
      start_period: 20s

  web:
    image: vabene1111/recipes:latest
    container_name: tandoor
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - tandoor_media:/opt/recipes/mediafiles
      - tandoor_static:/opt/recipes/staticfiles
    environment:
      DB_ENGINE: django.db.backends.postgresql
      POSTGRES_HOST: db
      POSTGRES_PORT: 5432
      POSTGRES_USER: djangouser
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"
      POSTGRES_DB: djangodb
      SECRET_KEY: "${SECRET_KEY}"
      ALLOWED_HOSTS: "recipes.yourdomain.com"
      GUNICORN_MEDIA: 0
      TZ: America/Los_Angeles
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy

  nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: tandoor_nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8090:80"
    volumes:
      - tandoor_media:/media
      - tandoor_static:/static
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro
    depends_on:
      - web

volumes:
  db_data:
  tandoor_media:
  tandoor_static:

# nginx.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    
    location /media/ {
        alias /media/;
    }
    
    location /static/ {
        alias /static/;
    }
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://tandoor:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

# .env
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your-db-password
SECRET_KEY=your-random-50-char-secret-key

docker compose up -d

Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

recipes.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8090
}

Visit https://recipes.yourdomain.com → create admin account on first visit.

Part 3: Import Recipes

From URL (automatic scraping)

Recipes → Create → Import from URL
Paste URL: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/...
Tandoor scrapes the page and extracts:
- Title, description, image
- Ingredients with amounts
- Instructions (step by step)
- Nutrition information (if available)
Review and save

Supported sites include:

Allrecipes, Food Network, Epicurious
NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, Bon Appétit
BBC Food, BBC Good Food
Minimalist Baker, Cookie and Kate
Plus 2,000+ more via recipe schema.org markup

Manual recipe entry

Recipes → Create → New Recipe
Add ingredients with amounts and units
Add steps with rich text editor
Set cooking time, servings, nutrition

Import from other apps

# Import from Paprika (export to .paprikarecipes):
# Recipes → Import → Paprika

# Import from JSON/CSV:
# Recipes → Import → Bulk Import

Part 4: Meal Planning

Weekly planner

Meal Plan → + Add
Select recipe, date, meal type (breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack)
Set number of servings

Drag and drop

The planner shows a weekly grid — drag recipes between days to plan your week.

Generate shopping list from meal plan

Meal Plan → Select meals (checkboxes)
Shopping → Create shopping list from selection
Tandoor combines ingredients, merges duplicates, scales by servings:
- Recipe A needs 2 cups flour (4 servings)
- Recipe B needs 1 cup flour (2 servings)
- Combined: 3 cups flour

Part 5: Shopping Lists

Smart ingredient combining

Tandoor automatically:

Converts units (cups → grams using density data)
Merges the same ingredient from multiple recipes
Deducts what you already have (if using inventory tracking)

Supermarket sorting

Settings → Shopping → Supermarkets
Add a supermarket: Whole Foods
Add categories: Produce, Dairy, Meat, Bakery, Dry Goods
Assign ingredients to categories (one-time setup)
Shopping list automatically sorts items by store layout

Generate a share link to a read-only list:

Shopping list → Share → copy link
Family members open link on phone while shopping

Part 6: Nutrition Tracking

# Tandoor uses Open Food Facts for nutrition data.
# Enable in settings:
# Settings → Integrations → Open Food Facts: Enabled

# Per recipe, nutrition shows:
# - Calories per serving
# - Protein, Fat, Carbohydrates
# - Fiber, Sugar, Sodium

Per-meal nutrition in the meal planner shows daily totals.

Part 7: REST API

# Get API token:
# Settings → API → Create Token

TOKEN="your-api-token"
BASE="https://recipes.yourdomain.com"

# List all recipes:
curl "$BASE/api/recipe/" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" | jq '.[].name'

# Get a recipe by ID:
curl "$BASE/api/recipe/42/" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN"

# Create a recipe:
curl -X POST "$BASE/api/recipe/" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Pasta Carbonara", "servings": 4}'

# Get shopping list:
curl "$BASE/api/shopping-list-entry/" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" | jq '.[].ingredient.name'

# Get today's meal plan:
curl "$BASE/api/meal-plan/?from_date=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)&to_date=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN"

Home Assistant integration

# configuration.yaml — show tonight's dinner:
sensor:
  - platform: rest
    name: Tandoor Tonight
    resource: https://recipes.yourdomain.com/api/meal-plan/
    params:
      from_date: "{{ now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d') }}"
      to_date: "{{ now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d') }}"
    headers:
      Authorization: !secret tandoor_token
    value_template: >
      {{ value_json | selectattr('meal_type', 'eq', 3) | 
         map(attribute='recipe.name') | join(', ') }}

Part 8: Grocy Integration

Tandoor + Grocy creates a complete food management stack:

Tandoor meal plan → generate shopping list
Grocy shopping list → check off items while shopping
Grocy inventory → know what you have
Tandoor → filter meal plans to what's in stock

# Enable Grocy sync in Tandoor:
# Settings → Integrations → Grocy
# Grocy URL: https://home.yourdomain.com
# Grocy API Key: your-grocy-api-key

Maintenance

# Update:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Database backup:
docker exec tandoor-db-1 pg_dump -U djangouser djangodb \
  | gzip > tandoor-db-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

# Media backup (recipe images):
tar -czf tandoor-media-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect tandoor_tandoor_media --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f web

Why Self-Host Tandoor Recipes?

The case for self-hosting Tandoor Recipes comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Tandoor Recipes means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Tandoor Recipes, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Tandoor Recipes headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Tandoor Recipes data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Tandoor Recipes without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Tandoor Recipes's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Tandoor Recipes backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Tandoor Recipes's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Tandoor Recipes's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Tandoor Recipes's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Tandoor Recipes's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f tandoor

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Tandoor Recipes's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats tandoor. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Tandoor Recipes Updated

Tandoor Recipes follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Tandoor Recipes is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

See also: Grocy — pair with Tandoor for inventory integration

See all open source recipe tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/home.

The SaaS-to-Self-Hosted Migration Guide (Free PDF)