Hey r/homelab,

I’m a Systems Engineer working in restaurant management. Recently, I was digging through one of my servers and found a stash of over 800 recipes saved as raw HTML5 files. I thought, "Great, I'll just spin up Mealie or Tandoor and import them."

It was a disaster. I wasted an entire day fighting imports, parsers, and bloated setups. I realized that most existing tools are great for managing inventory, but they treat food like sterile data, not like actual memories.

**So, I built my own: Zest.**

The philosophy is simple: We don't just save recipes; we save the memories around the table. I wanted a stack that was absurdly clean, lightweight, and easy to deploy on any Proxmox LXC or Raspberry Pi without dependency hell.

🛠 **The Tech Stack (Zero Bloat)**

* Backend: FastAPI + SQLite (Everything inside one container).
* Resource Efficiency: Idle memory usage is extremely low (\~50MB), perfect for older Pis or crowded nodes.
* Frontend: Vanilla JS (ES Modules) + HTML + Tailwind. No Node.js, no Webpack, no build steps. Just raw files served fast.

✨ **What makes Zest different?**

* Memories First: It’s a food diary. Link photos, dates, and locations to specific recipes to relive that "special Sunday dinner."
* Built-in Cooking Mode: Fullscreen step-by-step overlay. It auto-detects timers (regex) and uses the Wake Lock API so your screen doesn't go black while your hands are covered in dough.
* "What to Cook?" Reverse Search: Ingredients are normalized—search what's in your fridge, and it tells you what you can make.
* Public Links & Shareable Cards: Generate secure public URLs for family (no account needed), or export beautiful summary cards generated with Python's Pillow.
* Automated Backups: Built-in scheduler for DB and image backups.
* Scraping: 4-level URL scraping engine (JSON-LD -> Microdata -> Heuristics) to import new recipes easily.

**🚀 Deploy in seconds**

yaml

    version: '3.8'
    services:
      zest:
        image: ghcr.io/martinsantost/myzest:latest
        container_name: zest
        ports:
          - "8000:8000"
        volumes:
          - ./zest-data:/app/data
        restart: unless-stopped

🔗 **Links**

* **Live Demo:** [https://demo.myzest.app](https://demo.myzest.app) (Resets every hour, pre-loaded with examples).
* **GitHub Repo:** [https://github.com/MartinSantosT/myzest](https://github.com/MartinSantosT/myzest) (MIT License).

I just pushed the public repo. I’d love for the homelab community to test it, break it, and let me know your thoughts on the code and the concept. Cheers!



[Project] I spent a day fighting Mealie imports for 800+ recipes, so I built Zest: A Lightweight, Single-Container Recipe Manager (FastAPI + Vanilla JS)