How to Install Mealie on Arch Linux

Mealie is an open-source recipe manager that lets you organize your favorite recipes, plan your meals, and generate shopping lists. This guide will show you how to install Mealie on Arch Linux.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure your Arch Linux system is up-to-date by running the following command in terminal:

sudo pacman -Syu

Step 1: Install Required Packages

Mealie requires Python 3.7 or later, so make sure you have Python installed on your system. You can install it by running the following command:

sudo pacman -S python

Mealie also requires the following packages:

  • git
  • postgresql
  • libpqxx
  • libjpeg
  • libxslt
  • libxml2

You can install them using the following command:

sudo pacman -S git postgresql libpqxx libjpeg libxslt libxml2

Step 2: Clone the Mealie Repository

Next, you need to clone the Mealie repository to your local machine. To do that, run the following command in terminal:

git clone https://github.com/hay-kot/mealie.git

This will download the latest version of Mealie to your current working directory.

Step 3: Set Up PostgreSQL

Mealie uses PostgreSQL as its database. To set it up, run the following command in terminal:

sudo -u postgres initdb --locale $LANG -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data'
sudo systemctl enable postgresql
sudo systemctl start postgresql

Then, create a new PostgreSQL user and database for Mealie by running the following commands:

sudo -u postgres psql
CREATE USER mealie WITH PASSWORD 'your_password_here';
CREATE DATABASE mealie OWNER mealie;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE mealie TO mealie;
\q

Make sure to replace your_password_here in the second command with a strong password.

Step 4: Install Mealie Dependencies

Navigate to the Mealie directory that you cloned in Step 2, and run the following command to install Mealie's Python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 5: Configure Mealie

Before starting Mealie, you need to configure it by creating a .env file in the Mealie directory. You can do that by running the following command:

cp .env.template .env

Edit the .env file using your favorite text editor to set the DATABASE_URL variable as follows:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://mealie:your_password_here@localhost/mealie

Again, make sure to replace your_password_here with the password you set for the mealie user in Step 3.

Step 6: Start Mealie

Finally, you can start Mealie by running the following command in the Mealie directory:

python mealie.py

This will start the Mealie server on http://localhost:9000. You can access it using your web browser by navigating to that address.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Mealie on Arch Linux. You can now start adding recipes, planning meals, and generating shopping lists with ease. Enjoy!