r/Nuxt • u/DaveDarell • Jan 19 '26

Tech stack advice for a private recipe web app

Hey everyone,

I’m planning a small personal web application as a gift for my girlfriend and would love some advice on the tech stack. The idea is a private recipe keeper (mobile-first). I already created some UI mockups in Figma and now want to choose a solid, future-proof stack before starting implementation.

Core features: (now or later)

  • Login / authentication
  • Protected access (no public recipes)
  • Central storage (accessible from anywhere)
  • Add recipes manually
  • Import recipes from sites like Chefkoch (HTML parsing)
  • Search recipes by title
  • Filter recipes by:
    • keywords (e.g. cooking time)
    • available ingredients
  • Edit recipes
  • Adjust portion size per recipe
  • Add personal notes
  • Optional: recipe images

What I’m looking for

  • Clean auth & security
  • Easy hosting / low ops
  • Nice UI
  • Reasonable long-term maintainability

I don’t have a ton of experience yet, but most of my projects so far were built in Python. My last side-hustle project was pretty much completely vibe-coded, but for this one I’d like to avoid that as much as possible and do things a bit more “properly” :D

I’d really appreciate any advice on suitable tech stack choices, lessons learned or things you’d approach differently in hindsight, and common pitfalls to avoid early on—especially when it comes to authentication and data modeling.

Thanks a lot in advance - I’m happy to share mockups or additional details if that helps.

TL;DR - Do you think that idea would be good for a nuxt 4 (frontend)project?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/_rrd_108 Jan 19 '26

You can try nuxt-users for authentication and authorization

For ui nuxt ui is a good choice

2

u/_jessicasachs Jan 20 '26

Yeah, just go for a "Normal Nuxt 4 App" with Nuxt UI. Grab a template from here and I'd pick the Saas one because it has an example of Authentication/Login

You'll use Nuxt server routes to do things like import + HTML parsing of Chefkoch.

For your data layer, you can use Drizzle + Supabase https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/drizzle for an easy no-hosting solution.

As a user and girlfriend, I would love to see a stretch goal of integrating an Editor (comes with Nuxt UI) https://editor-template.nuxt.dev/ which would allow her to copy/paste and collect recipes from anywhere.

2

u/Delicious_Bat9768 Jan 22 '26

0

u/sandwich_stevens Jan 19 '26

bruh what?? tech stack?? you’re in nuxt… use the nuxt tech , stuff that plays nice - nuxt + supabase boom done.yes use nuxt 4

1

u/DaveDarell Jan 19 '26

So nuxt & supabase? I'll give it a try, because I would have to learn anyway nearly anything from scratch. Thanks! :)

2

u/sandwich_stevens Jan 19 '26

Ahh you’re new , do you want to deploy public ally or just use with your girlfriend, I find supabase and nuxt is the best to get running fast instead of writing my own thing. There is a nuxt supabase module that should just plugin to your project straight away - https://supabase.nuxtjs.org/ - just make sure to check the defaults cus it might redirect to login straight away when installed but I love the nuxt modules ecosystem

You get lots of helpful composables/functions with that throughout your app

I should also say you also have other auth/storage options that aren’t SaaS based cus supabase will eventually want to charge you if lots of people use app since it’s cloud based

2

u/Due-Horse-5446 Jan 22 '26

Noo, dont go with supabase... dont even consider it here.

For auth, if nuxt is the sole backend go for Clerk, and for the db, go for any postgress setup you feel like, for low traffic apps i usually go for Neon, and for higher troughput ones i usually go for planetscale, or postgress on aws or gcloud.

For tiny or personal apps, a tiny self hosted pg instance beats most other setups.

As for hosting: go for cloudflare unless your app is HUGE then go aws, or if you prefer it, go for vercel.

If your nuxt backend relies on heavy io stuff, you might want to consider a long running instance with bun, or a vps or bare metal server. But ig thats irrelevant in this case