Mealie-backed AI meal planner + shopping list for the family
Kayos
9368b64a81
Mealie's "Parse" button on every recipe is per-recipe; clicking through
226 of them is the toil Cobb explicitly hates. The bulk sterilizer wraps
cauldron's existing per-recipe Sterilizer (clawdforge → Sonnet, parses
free-form ingredient strings into structured form) into a household-wide
job with progress tracking, batch human review, and one-shot apply.
Flow:
1. POST /api/sterilize/bulk-start — creates cauldron_sterilize_jobs row,
spawns a daemon thread that walks every recipe in the user's
household. Recipes whose ingredients all already have food.id are
skipped (no point re-parsing Cobb's manual cleanup). For each
recipe needing work, Sonnet returns a structured proposal that gets
persisted to cauldron_sterilize_proposals.
2. GET /api/sterilize/bulk-status — polled every 2s by the UI for
{state, processed_count, skipped_count, error_count, current_slug}.
3. After the walk completes, state moves to 'review'. UI loads
/api/sterilize/bulk-jobs/<id>/proposals and renders one card per
recipe with a was→becomes diff per ingredient. User toggles
approve/skip per recipe.
4. POST /api/sterilize/bulk-apply/<id> with {approved_slugs: [...]}.
A second daemon thread iterates approved proposals, calls
Sterilizer.apply_recipe (which resolves food/unit IDs in Mealie,
creating any missing rows, then PUT /api/recipes/<slug>).
Job state machine: running → review → applying → done (or 'cancelled' /
'failed' along the way). At app startup, fail_stuck_sterilize_jobs()
recovers any 'running' / 'applying' rows older than 10 min with no
progress — covers the case where the daemon thread's gunicorn worker
died mid-job. New job state lives in DB; thread is just a runner.
Concurrency: the start endpoint blocks if the household already has a
running/applying job. Sterilize calls cost clawdforge time and parallel
jobs would race on Mealie writes, so one-at-a-time per household is the
right ceiling.
UI lives at /sterilize. Linked from /me → "tools → bulk sterilize" since
it's a one-off admin action, not part of the daily flow. Mobile-aware,
diff cards expand on click. Disabled "apply" button when no recipes
are selected; preview-error rows can't be approved.
DB: two new tables (migrations 015+016). cauldron_sterilize_jobs tracks
overall job state with last_progress_at for the stuck-job recovery;
cauldron_sterilize_proposals holds per-recipe JSON proposals with the
approval flag and the final apply_at/apply_error.
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| cauldron | ||
| scripts | ||
| tests | ||
| .env.example | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| compose.yml | ||
| Dockerfile | ||
| LICENSE | ||
| README.md | ||
| requirements.txt | ||
cauldron
Mealie-backed AI meal planner + shopping list for the family. LAN-only,
internal tool. Mealie at recipes.sulkta.com is the source of truth for
recipes / meal plans / shopping lists; cauldron is the AI layer + Abby's
branded UI on top.
Status
v0.1 — backend bones (current). Ingredient sterilizer endpoint working. No UI yet; bearer-auth API only. Frontend + Authentik OIDC arrives in v0.2. Native Kotlin Android in v0.5.
Surface (v0.1)
GET /healthz liveness + clawdforge upstream
GET /api/recipes list Mealie recipes (paginated)
POST /api/sterilize/preview/<slug> dry-run AI parse, return proposals
POST /api/sterilize/apply/<slug> write parses back to Mealie
All routes except /healthz require Authorization: Bearer <ADMIN_BEARER>.
Architecture
Abby's phone (later: Kotlin app)
│
▼
cauldron (Flask, port 7790, LAN-only)
├─ Mealie API client ─── recipes.sulkta.com (source of truth)
├─ clawdforge client ─── 192.168.0.5:8800 (claude -p runner)
└─ Authentik OIDC (v0.2)
cauldron does NOT hold its own database in v0.1 — all state lives in Mealie. A small Postgres/MariaDB schema lands in v0.2 for Abby-specific prefs + chat history.
Ingredient sterilizer
Mealie's CRF parser is mediocre. Cobb's hand-typed recipes have lots of free-form quantity strings ("about 2 cups cooked white rice", "1 small handful kale", "a pinch of salt") that don't aggregate cleanly into a shopping list.
The sterilizer batches all ingredients of one recipe into a single Sonnet call (via clawdforge), gets back parallel structured parses, then on apply links each parse to existing Mealie food/unit records (creating any missing by name) and PUTs the recipe back.
Preview is non-destructive — review proposals before apply.
# Dry-run preview
curl -sS -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $ADMIN_BEARER" \
http://192.168.0.5:7790/api/sterilize/preview/spaghetti-bolognese | jq .
# Apply (creates missing foods/units by default)
curl -sS -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $ADMIN_BEARER" \
http://192.168.0.5:7790/api/sterilize/apply/spaghetti-bolognese | jq .
Deploy
ssh lucycd /mnt/user/appdata && git clone <gitea-url> cauldron && cd cauldron/build(or wherever the deploy convention lands)- Drop
.envat/mnt/cache/appdata/secrets/cauldron.env(chmod 600 root:root)CLAWDFORGE_TOKENis already populated by the bootstrap (seememory/2026-04-28.md)MEALIE_API_TOKEN— mint atrecipes.sulkta.com→ user → API tokensADMIN_BEARER— pick 32 bytes of entropySECRET_KEY— 32 bytes for Flask sessions
docker compose up -d --build- Smoke:
curl http://192.168.0.5:7790/healthz
Roadmap
- v0.1 ✓ — sterilizer backend + Flask shell
- v0.2 — Authentik OIDC, Abby-branded web UI, palette CSS, postgres for prefs
- v0.3 — meal plan generator (week → Mealie meal plan write)
- v0.4 — shopping list aggregator (read meal plan → consolidated grocery list)
- v0.5 — native Kotlin + Compose Android app (read-only shopping list + plan view)
Repo layout
cauldron/
├─ cauldron/
│ ├─ config.py env-driven config
│ ├─ forge.py clawdforge HTTP client
│ ├─ mealie.py Mealie API client
│ ├─ sterilizer.py ingredient parse + apply pipeline
│ └─ server.py Flask app
├─ Dockerfile
├─ compose.yml
├─ requirements.txt
└─ .env.example