Recipe Scraper Site Compatibility

Mealie's built-in recipe scraper extracts structured data from recipe websites. Compatibility varies — some sites block automated access (Cloudflare, aggressive bot detection), others work flawlessly.

Reliable (high success rate)

Site	Notes
BBC Good Food (bbcgoodfood.com)	Excellent. Fast parsing, full ingredient + step extraction.
RecipeTin Eats (recipetineats.com)	Very reliable. Good image extraction.
Budget Bytes (budgetbytes.com)	Works ~70% of time. Rate-limit sensitive — add 1-2s delay between imports.
Love and Lemons (loveandlemons.com)	Works well. Vegan/vegetarian focus.

Unreliable / Blocked (low success rate)

Site	Issue
AllRecipes (allrecipes.com)	Aggressive bot detection. HTTP 400 on most attempts.
Simply Recipes (simplyrecipes.com)	Blocks automated scrapers.
Damn Delicious (damndelicious.net)	Cloudflare or similar protection. Fails consistently.
Gimme Some Oven (gimmesomeoven.com)	Same blocking issue as above.

Curated import strategy (near-100% success)

When batch-importing by cuisine or theme, search only BBC Good Food and RecipeTin Eats for individual recipe URLs. Restricting to these two sites yields near-100% scraper success, compared to ~50-60% when mixing sources.

Workflow for cuisine batch imports:

Search site:bbcgoodfood.com <cuisine> recipe and site:recipetineats.com <cuisine> recipe
Pick individual recipe URLs (not category/list pages — URLs must end in a recipe slug like /easy-chicken-fajitas)
Run the batch import script from references/batch-import.md with 2-second delays
Expect 90-100% success rate

Real-world example: A 20-recipe batch (10 Mexican, 10 Mediterranean) from BBC Good Food + RecipeTin Eats imported with 20/20 success (100%). The same approach with mixed sources typically yields 10-12 successes.

Workarounds for blocked sites

Manual entry: Copy-paste ingredients and steps into Mealie's manual recipe form.
Screenshot + OCR: Not implemented yet, but Mealie supports OCR recipe creation (requires OpenAI API key or local LLM).
Alternative source: Many popular recipes exist on multiple sites — search BBC Good Food or RecipeTin Eats for a similar version.
Import from JSON: If you have recipes in JSON-LD or schema.org format, use Mealie's JSON import endpoint.

Testing a new site

# Quick test — if this returns 400, the site is likely blocked
curl -s -X POST "http://127.0.0.1:9925/api/recipes/create/url" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer *** \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/recipe/test"}'

A successful import returns 200/201 with recipe JSON. 400 usually means the scraper couldn't extract data from the page. 500 means the site blocked the request entirely.

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