mealie

What This Skill Does

The Mealie skill for OpenClaw provides a robust interface for interacting with your self-hosted Mealie instance, a popular open-source recipe manager and meal planner. By bridging your AI agent with the Mealie REST API, this skill allows for seamless automation of kitchen management tasks. Whether you are adding new recipes, organizing your weekly meal plans, or generating shopping lists, the skill acts as a direct conduit to your culinary data. It utilizes a lightweight Bash script wrapper that leverages 'curl' and 'jq' to perform authenticated requests, ensuring that your interactions are both secure and scriptable within your OpenClaw environment. The skill is designed to handle key API endpoints while remaining extensible for advanced users.

Installation

To install this skill, run the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/g1mb01d/mealie in your terminal. After installation, you must configure your environment variables to allow the agent to authenticate with your instance. Navigate to your Mealie UI, generate a JWT token via Settings, and export the following in your shell session: export MEALIE_URL="https://your-mealie-url" and export MEALIE_TOKEN="your-api-token". Finally, ensure the included script is executable by running chmod +x scripts/mealie.sh within the skill directory.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for users who manage a high volume of recipes and want to integrate meal planning into their digital workflow. You can use it to batch-add recipes imported from digital sources, programmatically generate meal plans based on existing recipe IDs, or fetch shopping lists to sync with mobile applications. It is perfect for users who prefer terminal-based control over a GUI for routine administrative tasks.

Example Prompts

1. "I found a great recipe online; please use the Mealie skill to add it to my collection using this JSON file: ./recipe.json."
2. "Can you fetch the shopping list for the current meal plan and summarize the ingredients I need to buy?"
3. "Search my Mealie database for any recipes containing 'Chicken' and 'Curry' and show me the IDs."

Tips & Limitations

The Mealie skill relies strictly on environment variables for security, meaning tokens are never saved to disk; however, remember to rotate your tokens periodically. Note that the script requires 'jq' for JSON parsing, so ensure it is installed on your host system. For complex queries not supported by the default script, you can easily extend scripts/mealie.sh by adding custom 'curl' commands to the existing case statement.