CookTrace

Trace Every Recipe, From Pantry to Plate

A self-hosted recipe, pantry, and cooking tracker.
No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync unless you opt in.

Coming to Apple devices: the Trace apps have no iPhone app yet, because building and testing one needs a Mac and an iPhone. Chip in on Ko-fi. Self-hosting stays free either way.

Jump to: What it is · Features · Install · Env vars · Docs

What CookTrace is

CookTrace runs as a single Docker container on your own hardware, with a PWA for the browser and a native Android app for your phone. No accounts on external services, no data leaving your network, no subscriptions.

Third app in the Trace family alongside NutriTrace, LiftTrace, and NoteTrace.

Principles

• Self-hosting is and will remain free. The server, PWA, and source code will never be paywalled.
• No trackers, no analytics, no telemetry. CookTrace doesn't phone home; your usage is invisible to anyone but you.
• Your data stays on your hardware. No central server, no cloud sync that can read it; nothing leaves your network unless you opt into a third-party integration (Open Food Facts, USDA, an AI provider).
• Open source under AGPL-3.0. Every line that touches your data is readable.

Features

Cooking

• Recipe library. Full recipe model, cook mode, cook log, live scaling with fraction-aware ingredient math, per-step photos, inline unit converter, FDA-style 34-nutriment Nutrition Facts box. → full guide
• Pantry. Variants, expiration digests, barcode scanning (ML Kit native, QuaggaJS web), OFF + USDA quality signals, pantry-match pill on every recipe card. → full guide
• Cook Diary + Meal Planner. List and month-calendar views, plan-then-cook flow, drag to re-plan. → full guide
• Shopping list. Generate from a recipe (skips stocked items), aisle grouping, cross-recipe dedup. → full guide

Organizing

• Cookbooks + Kitchens. Named collections, per-user and public-link shares, Kitchens for household-wide fanout with Auto-Share. → Cookbooks · Kitchens
• Recipe import. URL (Standard / Enhanced / Smart tiers), file, photo, and bulk Mealie / Paprika / Tandoor zip archives. → full guide
• Manage catalog. Categories (with color dots), tags, kitchen gear, pantry categories, units, cookbooks; drag-to-reorder with per-row recipe counts.

AI + Federation

• Trace AI. Reads your recipes, pantry, diary, and cookbooks; can log a cook, plan a meal, add to shopping, or import a recipe from a URL, all conversationally. 19 tools total. Multi-provider (Claude / OpenAI / Gemini / any OpenAI-compatible endpoint). Smart Log voice, image attach, cook-mode voice control. → full guide
• NutriTrace federation. Pull food data per-user with a Bearer token; log cooks back to the NT diary. → full guide
• Model Context Protocol (MCP). Expose your recipes, pantry, shopping list, and cook diary to external AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex) via the standard MCP Streamable HTTP transport. Off by default; opt in with MCP_ENABLED=1. Read, write, and destructive tool tiers, each independently gated by its own env flag and token scope. → full guide

Accounts + platforms

• Multi-user + OIDC SSO. Authentik, Keycloak, Pocket ID, Authelia, Auth0, Google. Auto-link verified emails, optional auto-register, admin-group claims, RP-initiated logout. → full guide
• Backups. Full-DB zip with zip-slip / zip-bomb defenses, scheduled auto-backups, portable JSON export, Android local-backup zip. → full guide
• Native Android app. Offline local mode or server-connected differential sync. → full guide
• Wear OS. A watch app for Wear OS 3 and up: your shopping list by aisle, ticked off with a trolley in one hand, and the cook you are in, with ingredients and steps as checklists, the timers a step asks for ringing on your wrist and showing on the watch face, and "I cooked this" at the end. It talks to your server itself, so it works in a shop with no signal, and it pairs itself when you sign in on the phone. → full guide
• Foldables (preliminary). Half open like a book, a recipe opens like a cookbook, the ingredients on one side of the crease and the method on the other. Settings, Shopping, the cook diary and Manage split on the room they have, and dialogs, sheets, timers and Trace keep off the fold.

Apps

• Web (PWA). Any modern browser. Add to home screen for a full-screen app-like experience.
• Android. Signed APK on the Releases page. Local mode is fully offline; connected mode syncs to your server. → install guide
• iOS. Not currently available.

Install

Published to two registries with identical tag sets: ghcr.io/traceapps/cooktrace (primary) and traceapps/cooktrace on Docker Hub (mirror). The snippet below uses GHCR; swap in traceapps/cooktrace:latest if that suits your setup.

Unraid: CookTrace is in Community Applications. Search for CookTrace in the Apps tab; the template sets the port, the appdata folders and the settings. Fill in JWT Secret before the first start.

Minimal docker-compose.yml:

services:
  cooktrace:
    image: ghcr.io/traceapps/cooktrace:latest
    container_name: cooktrace
    ports:
      - "3003:3003"
    volumes:
      - ./data/db:/data/db
      - ./data/uploads:/data/uploads
    environment:
      - JWT_SECRET=change-me-to-a-long-random-string
      - DB_PATH=/data/db/cooktrace.db
      - UPLOADS_PATH=/data/uploads
      # OIDC (optional): uncomment and fill in for SSO
      # - OIDC_ISSUER=https://auth.example.com
      # - OIDC_CLIENT_ID=cooktrace
      # - OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET=...
    restart: unless-stopped

Generate the JWT secret with openssl rand -base64 48, then:

docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:3003 and a first-run wizard walks you through enabling user management and creating an admin account.

Full walkthrough (env-file layout, reverse proxy, LAN-HTTP notes) at docs/getting-started/compose. Pre-release testers can grab the rolling dev-latest APK; occasional milestone builds also get numbered -devNN pre-releases. See DEPLOY.md for details.

Env vars

The most-asked knobs. Full list at docs/self-hosting/env-vars.

Env values take priority over Settings-UI values and lock the field for all users.

Data persistence

Bind-mount two host directories: the SQLite database (DB_PATH dir) and uploads (UPLOADS_PATH, which also holds uploads/backups/). The container is stateless beyond these two volumes.

Updating

docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Schema migrates on startup. Images are multi-arch (linux/amd64 + linux/arm64), so the same command works on x86 hosts, Raspberry Pi 4 / 5, Apple Silicon servers, and ARM cloud instances.

Tech stack

Svelte 5 (compat mode) + Vite 7 PWA · Capacitor 8 Android · Node.js + Express 5 + better-sqlite3 · recipe-scrapers Python bridge (baked into the image) · JWT httpOnly cookies + OIDC 1.0 (PKCE + state + nonce) · multi-arch Docker via GitHub Actions → GHCR.

Trace family

Part of the TraceApps family. Sister apps: NutriTrace for nutrition tracking, LiftTrace for weightlifting, NoteTrace for notes, tasks and reminders. Docs for the family at traceapps.github.io/docs.

More

ROADMAP.md · CHANGELOG.md · CONTRIBUTING.md · PRIVACY.md · Full documentation

Support

CookTrace is free to self-host and always will be. No paid tier, nothing behind a donation, no telemetry. It's built and maintained by one person.

The current goal is a Mac and an iPhone. None of the Trace apps run properly on an iPhone, because building and testing for iOS needs Apple hardware, plus the developer accounts for both app stores. That comes to about $1,300, and the itemised breakdown is on the Support page.

Helping doesn't have to cost anything: starring the repo, reporting bugs with detail, and translating all count, and stars are how self-hosted projects get found.

Disclaimer

CookTrace is not medical, health, or nutrition-professional software. Recipe entries, pantry tracking, AI-extracted nutrition, Trace AI suggestions, Smart Log parsing, and any analytical output are for informational and self-tracking purposes only. Consult a qualified healthcare professional, registered dietitian, or licensed nutritionist before starting a new eating plan or making significant dietary changes, especially with medical conditions in play (diabetes, eating disorders, food allergies, pregnancy, breastfeeding, pediatric needs, kidney or liver disease, metabolic disorders). Trace AI answers can be incorrect; third-party nutrition data (Open Food Facts, recipe websites, schema.org markup, AI photo extraction) is community-curated and may contain inaccuracies. Use at your own risk.

License

AGPL-3.0: entire codebase including the Android app source.