Your recipes, as plain text files
A small, self-contained recipe manager. Import your recipes, browse and edit them in a terminal, and export a website you can put online, with no HTML or database to learn.
How it works
Your library is a folder of plain-text files, one per recipe, so it is easy to back up, search, edit with any editor and keep for good. There is no database to break.
Read Meal-Master .mmf files, even hand-typed ones, or pull everything from a Tandoor Recipes server, photos included.
Search as you type, read a recipe, and change it in a form with fields for the title, ingredients and steps. The mouse works too.
One command writes a complete static website with live search, a page for each recipe and a print button.
Browse
Run tiecook with no arguments to open it. It is a terminal program, with a keyboard and mouse interface that works on Linux and Windows.
tiecook - My Recipes Search: _ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Banana Bread [Baking, Favorite] Chili [Main dish] Pancakes [Breakfast] Tomato Soup [Soup, Favorite] 4/4 Enter open F4 edit F5 import F8 del type=search F10 quit
The list. Type to search; the bar at the bottom shows the keys.
Banana Bread Serves 1 loaf - Baking, Favorite Ingredients 3 Ripe bananas 1/3 cup Melted butter 3/4 cup Sugar 1 Egg 1 tsp Vanilla 1 tsp Baking soda 1 1/2 cup Flour Steps 1. Mash the bananas and stir in the butter, sugar, egg and vanilla. 2. Mix in the baking soda and flour. 3. Bake at 350 F for 60 minutes. scroll e edit d delete p photo q back F10 quit
A recipe, open to read. Press e to edit it.
F4 edits it, F8 deletes it, with a confirmationF7 adds a new recipe, starting from a titleF5 imports Meal-Master files from a file or folder you nameo opens the source web page, i opens the photo, in your usual appsp sets or replaces the photo, from a .jpg, .png or .webpe edits, d deletes, and q goes backA form with fields and lists. Add, delete and reorder ingredients and steps, and save with F2. A long step opens in your own editor, and every line you type becomes its own numbered step.
Give a recipe a photo by putting recipe-name.jpg beside it, or attach one in the editor. It is copied into your library.
Website
Export writes the whole site: an index with a live search box, your favourites highlighted, alphabetical groups, one page per recipe, a shared style sheet and your photos.
The sample site, as exported. Both pages are plain HTML, so any web server will do.
.tiecook-site file, and refuses to touch anything elseRecipe files and exported pages keep full UTF-8. Only the terminal display is simplified to plain ASCII, because the console shows one byte per cell.
Commands
tiecook browse, edit and delete recipes tiecook list [--library DIR] list every recipe tiecook search [--library DIR] words search titles, keywords and text tiecook import mealmaster [--library DIR] file|dir... tiecook import tandoor [--library DIR] [--url URL] [--token TOKEN] [--limit N] tiecook export html [--library DIR] output-dir
Importing again updates a recipe in place instead of making a duplicate. --library picks a different library for one run.
Get tiecook
Version 1.0.5, under the MIT licence. Written in Free Pascal, one source for both systems. It is a terminal program, so run it from a terminal.
One AppImage (4 MB), with OpenSSL bundled so the Tandoor import works. Make it executable, then run it from a terminal.
Download for LinuxAn installer (1.8 MB) that includes the OpenSSL files. Open tiecook from a Command Prompt or Windows Terminal once it is installed.
Download for WindowsBuild it with Free Pascal 3.2.2 and make. The code, the notes and every release are on GitHub.
The downloads come from GitHub, where the latest release is always listed.