hermes-config/skills/self-hosting/docker-service-deployment/references/mealie-batch-import.md

Mealie Batch Recipe Import

Authenticate via API and bulk-import recipes from URLs. Mealie's built-in scraper handles ~300+ sites but reliability varies wildly.

API Auth Pattern

import requests

MEALIE = "http://127.0.0.1:9925"  # or https://grajmedia.duckdns.org:3449

resp = requests.post(
    f"{MEALIE}/api/auth/token",
    data={"username": "email@example.com", "password": "password", "grant_type": ""},
    headers={"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
)
token = resp.json()["access_token"]
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}", "Content-Type": "application/json"}

Batch Import

urls = ["https://example.com/recipe-1", "https://example.com/recipe-2"]

for url in urls:
    resp = requests.post(
        f"{MEALIE}/api/recipes/create/url",
        json={"url": url},
        headers=headers,
        timeout=60
    )
    # 200/201 = success, 400 = scraper failed

Scraper Reliability (as of June 2026)

Site	Reliability	Notes
BBC Good Food	High	Consistently works
RecipeTin Eats	High	Good parser support
Budget Bytes	Medium	HTTPException ~30% of the time, retry helps
Damn Delicious	Medium	Intermittent blocks
AllRecipes	Low	Frequently blocked (Cloudflare)
Simply Recipes	Low	Frequently blocked
Gimme Some Oven	Low	Frequently blocked

Add time.sleep(1.5) between requests to avoid rate limiting.

URL Format

The /api/recipes/create/url endpoint expects a full recipe page URL. It does NOT accept search results, category pages, or non-recipe URLs. The scraper extracts title, ingredients, steps, image, and metadata automatically.