Weekly Meal Planner

A meal planner my household actually uses, deployed and installable like a native app.

Overview

Meal-planning apps are either bloated subscription products or a shared note that falls out of date. This is a purpose-built, self-hosted planner for a two-person household: pick meals for the week, get a grocery list automatically split by store, and track what actually gets cooked.

What I Built

• A full-stack Node/Express app with a SQLite-compatible database (libSQL via Turso), covering meals, weekly plans, grocery items, and per-store shopping lists.
• An automatic grocery-list generator that pulls ingredients from the week’s planned meals, learns which store each ingredient belongs to over time, and filters out anything already in the pantry.
• A meal-suggestion feature that ranks options by rating and how recently they were cooked, so planning a week takes under a minute.
• Password-protected access with token-based sessions, safe for exposing a personal app to the public internet.
• Packaged as an installable Progressive Web App (manifest, service worker, home-screen icons), so it behaves like a native app on a phone.
• Containerized with Docker and deployed on Render, with a health-check endpoint for uptime monitoring.

Tech

Node.js, Express, libSQL/Turso (SQLite-compatible), React (precompiled at build time), Docker, deployed on Render.

Status

Deployed and in active daily use.