Perimattic Managed Mealie - Recipe Manager on AWS

This AMI runs Mealie, the open-source self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner, with PostgreSQL 17 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The official Mealie image is pinned to 3.30.0, with PostgreSQL 17.11, and baked into the AMI, so first start does not depend on a registry. Built on the open-source Mealie (AGPL-3.0). Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Mealie project; product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Why Mealie?

Mealie keeps your recipes in one place: it imports a recipe from a web page address, lets you edit and organise recipes with tags and categories, plans meals on a calendar and builds shopping lists. Several people in a household can share it, and it has a REST API.

What Perimattic adds

No default login: every fresh Mealie ships with a built-in administrator account whose email and password are published in its documentation. During first-login setup this AMI creates your own administrator with a random 24-character password generated on your server, then deletes the built-in account and checks that it can no longer sign in. Setup also checks that the new password works, that a wrong password and a stranger are refused, that sign-up is closed (with or without an invitation token) and that anonymous requests to the API are refused. All of this happens before the site is published. There are no default or shared credentials in the image.

PostgreSQL: recipes are stored in PostgreSQL instead of the default SQLite file. The database is reachable only inside the Docker network.

HTTPS: Apache is configured as a reverse proxy and a free Let's Encrypt certificate is requested for your domain with certbot. Mealie listens only on the loopback interface, runs as an unprivileged user, and its interactive API documentation page is switched off.

Patched base: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS built through an automated EC2 Image Builder pipeline, with security updates applied at build time.

What you should know

No mail server is configured, so Mealie cannot send password-reset or invitation emails; you share an invitation link with the people you want to let in. Mealie locks an account for 24 hours after five wrong passwords in a row, so keep the address private if that matters to you. Importing a recipe from a web address makes this server fetch that page, which needs outbound internet access; opening the Admin About page asks the GitHub API for the latest release number.

Mealie used about 0.31 GB of memory and PostgreSQL about 0.07 GB in our tests, so a t3.small (2 GB) is the recommended starting size.

Licence

Mealie is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0); this AMI runs the unmodified upstream image, whose source is at github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie. PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License.

Getting Started Launch the AMI and open ports 22, 80 and 443 in the security group SSH in and answer the setup prompts (domain and admin email) Open https://your-domain  and sign in with the admin email and the password printed at the end of setup Create an invitation link under Admin to let family or friends register

A domain name with an A record pointing at the instance is required, because the site is served over HTTPS.

This AMI is built and supported by Perimattic.

Book a free setup consultation at https://cal.com/gaurav-pareek-perimattic/marketplace-setup-consultations  or email us at aws-support@perimattic.com .

Support Managed and supported by Perimattic, a cloud infrastructure company with 13+ years of experience serving global clients. We offer free setup assistance, custom integrations, infrastructure consulting, and 24/7 support.