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Updating Mealie

Read The Release Notes

You MUST read the release notes prior to upgrading your container. Mealie has a robust backup and restore system for managing your data. Pre-v1.0.0 versions of Mealie use a different database structure, so if you are upgrading from pre-v1.0.0 to v1.0.0, you MUST backup your data and then re-import it. Even if you are already on v1.0.0, it is strongly recommended to backup all data before updating.

Before Upgrading

Improved Image Processing

Starting with v3.7.0, we updated our image processing algorithm to improve image quality and compression. New image processing can be up to 40%-50% smaller on disk while providing higher resolution thumbnails. To take advantage of these improvements on older recipes, you can run our image-processing script:

docker exec -it mealie bash
python /opt/mealie/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/mealie/scripts/reprocess_images.py

Options

  • --workers N: Number of worker threads (default: 2, safe for low-powered devices)
  • --force-all: Reprocess all recipes regardless of current image state

Example

python /opt/mealie/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/mealie/scripts/reprocess_images.py --workers 8

Upgrading to Mealie v1 or later

If you are upgrading from pre-v1.0.0 to v1.0.0 or later (v2.0.0, etc.), make sure you read Migrating to Mealie v1!

Backing Up Your Data

See Backups and Restore Section for details on backing up your data

Docker

For all setups using Docker, the updating process looks something like this:

  • Stop the container using docker compose down
  • If you are not using the latest tag, change the version (image tag) in your docker-compose file
  • Pull the latest image using docker compose pull
  • Start the container again using docker compose up -d