Manna is a simple, fast, self-hosted recipe app. Organize recipes into sections, then follow them step by step in cook mode on your phone, tablet, or desktop.
- Sections and recipes in a sidebar: create, rename, recolor, and delete sections, and search recipes by title or section. On phones, swipe right to open the sidebar and left to close it.
- A color for every section, picked from eight when you create or edit it. Each recipe page, its cook mode, and the sidebar beside it take on its section's color; the home page and Settings use Manna's own orange.
- Home page with the recipes you opened most recently and the newest ones you added, so the ones you're cooking this week are a tap away. If you left cook mode partway through the last recipe you opened, it shows the step you were on, with a button to pick up where you left off.
- Recipes with a description, servings, prep and cook times, a source link, ingredients, steps, and notes. The editor gives each ingredient and step its own row; press Enter for the next ingredient, and paste a whole list to split it into rows.
- Import from a link: paste a recipe page's address on the New recipe page and Manna fills in the form for you to check before saving. It reads the recipe data most recipe sites publish for search engines (schema.org JSON-LD). Some big sites turn away requests that don't come from a browser; copy those recipes in by hand.
- Cook mode shows every step over a gradient in the section's color, in a scrolling list with the current one centered, like song lyrics. Tap a step to jump to it, or use Previous/Next, the arrow keys, or space. Ingredients sit beside the steps on wide screens and in a drawer on phones. Each device remembers its place. Tap Keep awake, beside Previous, to keep the screen on while cooking; it shows when it's on, and tapping again lets the screen sleep. Browsers only allow this over HTTPS or on
localhost, and Home Screen apps need iOS 18.4 or later. - Light and dark themes: follow the device, or pick one in Settings. Each device remembers its choice.
- Backups from Settings: export the whole library as JSON, or restore a backup to replace everything (ids are kept, so links keep working). Backups from before sections had colors still restore; their sections take turns through the colors. Backups are limited to 16 MB, thousands of typical recipes; the app refuses a change that would make the library too big to restore.
Run the published image with Docker Compose:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zhamann/manna/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -dOpen http://localhost:4321. Images are built for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64.
On an iPhone or iPad, open the app in Safari and choose Share → Add to Home Screen to get a Manna icon that opens it.
The app has no accounts, so keep it on a private network or behind a reverse proxy that handles authentication. Serve it over HTTPS if you want cook mode to keep the screen awake.
Importing from a link makes the server fetch the page, so it needs outbound internet access. It only connects to public addresses: it refuses localhost, private networks, and link-local addresses such as cloud metadata services, including through redirects and DNS. That also means it can't import from another app on your own network.
To use another port, change the host side of the mapping in docker-compose.yml, e.g. "8080:4321" serves the app on port 8080. To reach the app only through a reverse proxy on the same machine, bind it to loopback with "127.0.0.1:4321:4321".
The database lives in /data inside the container, which Compose mounts from the manna-data volume, so it survives restarts, upgrades, and recreating the container.
Export a backup from Settings → Export, or fetch one from a script:
curl -o manna-backup.json http://localhost:4321/backup.jsonTo restore, open Settings → Restore and pick a backup file. Restoring replaces every section and recipe with the backup's and can't be undone, so export first if you might want the current library back.
docker compose pull
docker compose up -dThe new container uses the same volume and applies any database migrations when it starts. Export a backup before upgrading: migrations only move forward, so going back to an older version means starting it with an empty volume and restoring that backup.
Requires Node 26 and pnpm.
pnpm install
pnpm devOpen http://localhost:4321.
To run a production build:
pnpm build
pnpm start| Variable | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
DATA_DIR |
./data |
Folder holding the SQLite database |
PORT |
4321 |
Port the production server listens on |
HOST |
localhost |
Interface to bind; use 0.0.0.0 to expose it |
Set version in package.json and merge that change, then push a matching tag from main:
git tag v1.2.3
git push origin v1.2.3The release workflow runs the CI checks, confirms the tag matches package.json, and publishes ghcr.io/zhamann/manna as 1.2.3, 1.2, and latest. A prerelease tag like v1.3.0-rc.1 is published only under its own version, so latest stays on the newest stable release. Once the image is up, it publishes a GitHub release, "Manna v1.2.3", listing the pull requests merged since the last one; prereleases are marked as such.
GitHub creates the package as private on the first release; make it public in the package settings so docker compose pull works without signing in.