Chefly - AI Powered Recipe Generator

Chefly is a high-quality recipe generator powered by Claude AI.

Features:

• Multi user support, each user can maintain their own recipe list
• Mobile first UI design
• Share recipes via public link
• Mark favorite recipes, filter them, or delete unwanted ones
• Generate recipes by meat type, cuisine, dietary preferences, difficulty, and preparation time
• Admin panel to manage registered users and set recipe generation limits per user
• Generate shopping lists from recipes to easily bookmark ingredients
• Audit logging of every request in json or pretty format
• Supported sk, en language

Blog Post: Why this project?

Stack Information

Backend: Go

Frontend: Vite, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS

Storage: SQLite

AI Models

Models: Recipe generation uses Claude SDK (tested: Haiku & Sonnet). Images are generated with OpenAI DALL·E 3 at standard quality to reduce cost.

API Keys: Requires two keys one for Claude and one for OpenAI. Recommended model for recipes: claude-sonnet-4-20250514 (better results than claude-3-haiku-20240307).

Quick Start

1. Obtain an API key from the Anthropic console for Claude AI.
2. Obtain an API key from the OpenAI console for DALL·E 3
3. Create folder for database and generated images (e.g. in the current directory: mkdir chefly_data chefly_uploads).
4. Run the container as a regular user in a user namespace:

podman run -d \
  --name chefly \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --userns=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v ./chefly_data:/app/data:Z \
  -v ./chefly_uploads:/app/uploads:Z \
  -e JWT_SECRET="your-minimum-32-characters-signing-key" \
  -e CLAUDE_API_KEY="sk-ant..." \
  -e CLAUDE_MODEL="claude-sonnet-4-20250514" \
  -e OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..." \
  -e OPENAI_MODEL="dall-e-3" \
  -e REGISTRATION_ENABLED=true \
  -e RECIPE_GENERATION_LIMIT="unlimited" \
  -e AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED=true \
  -e AUDIT_LOG_LEVEL="info" \
  -e AUDIT_LOG_FORMAT="json" \
  --security-opt=no-new-privileges \
  --cap-drop=ALL \
  voidquark/chefly:latest

Note

To retain DALL·E 3 generated recipe images, persist /app/uploads. To keep the SQLite database, persist /app/data.

5. The first registered user becomes the admin. This cannot be changed without directly modifying the database.

Configuration

Environment variables:

Variable	Description	Example Value
JWT_SECRET	JWT signing key (min 32 characters). You can generate one using openssl rand -base64 32	9+RxeeHYEKAcpXbaVNy5YIU/Qk5Lr/uJ2J1tP16GayA=
CLAUDE_API_KEY	Anthropic Claude API key	sk-ant...
CLAUDE_MODEL	Claude AI model to use	claude-sonnet-4-20250514
OPENAI_API_KEY	OpenAI API key for image generation	sk-...
OPENAI_MODEL	OpenAI model to use	dall-e-3
REGISTRATION_ENABLED	Enable registration (true/false)	true
RECIPE_GENERATION_LIMIT	Global recipe generation limit per user (unlimited, 0, 5, etc.), overridable per user by the admin in the admin panel.	unlimited
AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED	Enable audit logging	true
AUDIT_LOG_LEVEL	Audit log level (debug, info, warn, error)	info
AUDIT_LOG_FORMAT	Log format (json or pretty)	json

Note

The container uses the chefly user (UID 1000, GID 1000) inside. If you experience permission issues with bind mounts, it’s likely due to this user mapping.

Audit Logging

Example JSON Log:

{
  "timestamp":"2025-01-15T14:30:45.123Z",
  "level":"warn",
  "event_type":"auth.login.failed",
  "message":"Login failed: user not found",
  "context":{
    "email_attempted":"unknown@example.com",
    "ip_address":"192.168.30.100",
    "request_id":"req-abc123",
    "status_code":401,
    "metadata":{"failure_reason":"user_not_found"}
  }
}

Project Status

Important

This project was created to explore the capabilities of Claude AI, experiment with model interactions, and plan development workflows around it. It was a self-exploration project with a single purpose to build something for my own personal use. I’m sharing it here in case someone wants to reuse it, fork it, extend it, or add new features. Breaking changes may occur at any time and without notice. Long term maintenance is uncertain. Anyone can open an issue for feature requests or bug fixes, but there is no guarantee that I will implement them, please don’t take it personally. There will be no human interaction with this project at the code level by design.

License

MIT License