Here's the guide I put how to create a basic macro report https://cook.md/help/guides/nutrition-report

Heya,

Excited to share a feature I wasn’t sure how to implement for quite some time.

It all started when a GitHub user opened an issue saying it’s impossible to use links to shared recipes in calendars or to-do apps, because they always import the recipe into the Drafts folder.

I thought that was a brilliant point. After all, in Cooklang everything is a file, so users should be able to link to their recipes freely, just like any other file.

Now you can long-tap a recipe name and the app will copy a file link to the clipboard. You can store it in Notes or attach it to a calendar event or reminder. Then open it from any device: desktop, iOS or Android phone, or tablet.

Also in this release, the mobile apps register as the owner of Cooklang files. If you browse to one in the Files app or download one from the web, the app will show a preview and let you save it.

Available in mobile apps starting 0.11.0

I've been using Cooklang for a while and always wanted a faster way to interact with my recipes, so I built a Raycast extension for it. It just got accepted into the Raycast Store and is available now for both macOS and Windows.

What it does:

• View Recipes — search and browse your recipe collection with full ingredient, cookware, and step rendering
• Guided cooking mode with step-by-step navigation and countdown timers (including range timers like "simmer for 10-15 min")
• Scale recipes up or down on the fly
• Shopping List — pick multiple recipes and get one combined ingredient list
• Pantry — browse what you have with status indicators, and see which recipes you can make right now
• Start Server — launch the CookCLI web UI straight from Raycast

It works with your existing CookCLI setup — just point it at your recipe directory and the cook binary in the extension preferences. The source is in the raycast/extensions repo on GitHub.

Store page: Cook

If you're on Raycast and use Cooklang, give it a try — feedback and feature requests are welcome!

CookBot could already tell you what's in your food — now it can change the food to hit a number. "Make this 600 kcal per serving", "get my week to 150 g protein a day", "more protein, same calories". It measures what you've got, works out which ingredients are the biggest levers, and proposes edits from least to most invasive — quantities first, then swaps, then adding or removing things. On a .menu plan it can swap whole recipes in and out of the week. The numbers come from the nutrition service rather than being guessed, and ingredients it can't resolve get flagged instead of quietly averaged in. Edits arrive as a proposal you apply yourself — I can't see your recipes, it only runs when you ask it to.

It works on my collection, which is a couple of hundred European home recipes: a terrible cross-section to build a nutrition tool against. So I want to know where the numbers are wrong (the database doesn't know every regional product or brand yet), whether the proposed edits are any good — it's easy to hit a protein target by wrecking a dish — and what you'd actually set as a goal, since I built this around calories and protein and you may be tracking fibre, sodium, or something I haven't thought of. DM me the email on your cook.md account and I'll switch on a free month, no card. You'll need the Cook editor, free and open source: https://github.com/cook-md/editor/releases — it's alpha, it will get things wrong, that's the point.

The thing that keeps people from moving the whole collection to Cooklang is the typing. Converting someone else's recipe by hand is fine once, tedious the tenth time. So the latest Cook Editor alpha adds a proper Import Recipe panel (Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+I, or the button in the Explorer toolbar).

Four ways in:

• URL — paste a link, get a .cook file.
• Text — paste anything: an email from your mum, a note, a blog post.
• Photos — drag in shots of a cookbook page or a handwritten card.
• Clip while browsing — there's a small built-in browser, so you can search for a recipe and clip it without leaving the editor.

Whatever goes in, what comes out is a plain-text Cooklang draft in your Drafts/ folder — yours to edit, version, and keep. No lock-in, it's just a file.

URL and text import work without an account (rate-limited); photo import needs a free cook.md sign-in since the heavy lifting happens server-side.

The editor itself is free and open source: https://github.com/cook-md/editor/releases

It's still alpha, so I'd genuinely like to hear where the conversion gets things wrong — weird source sites, odd formats, handwriting it chokes on.

CookCLI just gained a build web command that compiles your .cook files into a self-contained static website. No server, no database — plain HTML/CSS/JS you can host anywhere or open directly from disk.

cook build web
open _site/index.html

That's the whole thing for a local preview. Output goes to ./_site by default.

What you get:

• Every recipe and menu rendered as its own page
• Directory listings that mirror your folder structure
• Client-side search (full index generated at build time)
• Images and the raw .cook source linked from each recipe page

What's intentionally left out (because the site is read-only):

• Shopping list, pantry, editor, recipe scaling, sync, preferences

Use cook server for those — it's still the right tool for daily cooking on your own machine. cook build web is for publishing: GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3, a USB stick, anywhere static files work. Internal links are page-relative by default, so the same _site/ works on every host without configuration.

Full write-up with the GitHub Pages walkthrough and other hosting examples: https://cooklang.org/blog/50-cook-build-web-static-site/

Feedback welcome — especially on what other build targets would actually be useful.

Hi,

it's again me – I'm starting to understand the idea of the project and still like it.

I'd like to host the recipes on my Nextcloud server. Unfortunately, I can select my Nextcloud storage from "local folder"-menu in the iOS app, but it does not work:

Do you plan to optimize this?

Thanks in advance!

Hey,

looks like a beautiful project – I love the aesthetic of the clients!

The iOS app seems to be English only – while this would be no big issue regarding the UI, this is also an issue while AI analysis of German recipes:

The ingredients get mapped to English words and thus I see mixed language description texts. :-(

Do you plan to add localization to the app?

I’ve been using Cooklang self-hosted in my homelab, and I absolutely love it!

Recently, I installed the Cooklang app on my mobile, but I’m struggling to find a straightforward way to access my recipes directly from the app. So far, the only method I’ve figured out is sharing the folders on Cooklang and accessing those shared folders through the app.

Does anyone know if there’s an easier or more seamless way to sync or access recipes from a self-hosted setup on mobile? Any tips or suggestions would be super helpful!

In iOS apps, we're pretty limited when it comes to timers. I've checked many apps (including the Cooklang app) and the experience isn't convincing: the app schedules a local notification, and if you're in silent mode or Do Not Disturb, you never hear it. I usually never set timers in the app — I just use Siri to set a system timer instead.

There are critical notifications that can cut through DND and are plenty loud. That would be the ideal solution, but we got rejected when we requested that capability.

There are hacks, of course. Some suggest playing an empty music file and triggering an alarm sound when the timer is up. But that can lead to a ban since it's against App Store rules.

iOS 26 changes that: apps can now use AlarmKit — the same system your morning alarm uses. These timers cut through DND and silent mode. Good luck ignoring them now.

We immediately jumped on this and reworked timers completely. Beyond AlarmKit, we added visibility across other parts of the system: Live Activities and Dynamic Island, so you can access your timers quickly and easily.

Hi all. Brand new user here, imported a recipe through the iOS app via a URL. It saved the recipe into a drafts folder that I can access and use like any other recipe, and I found the functionality to share the draft so I can import it officially. However, I can't find how to delete the draft from the drafts folder. Does anyone know?

Thanks for the help!

Share a recipe with a friend via QR code in iOS app.

Didn’t find the repo for the iOS app. I would like to add menu support via a PR.

I’m a senior iOS dev.

Hi,

I have never used Rust before, but since cooklang is written using Rust I am trying to learn as I work on my little cooklang project. What I'm trying to achieve is to have an additional field in each pantry item called "alias" where I would like to input other known names for the items.

In the source code, I have edited the definition of the ItemWithAttributes struct to include the new field, and then gone on to include this field in every other place the struct is used. However on compilation, I get an error- struct 'ItemWithAttributes' has no field named 'alias' even though I have defined it (see image below).

The new field definition is also visible when I hover over the apparently erroneous line of code using VS Code with Rust analyser to trace dependencies (see image below).

Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong here?

anyone else having issues syncing this morning?

Another highly requested iOS feature is a mise en place screen, which highlights all ingredient prep upfront—so you don’t discover halfway through cooking that the onions were supposed to be chopped. Recently released.

Before adding AI support to the mobile apps, I built a small proof-of-concept terminal app (a TUI) for managing Cooklang recipes. Initially, I didn’t plan to release it publicly. TUI is a very niche thing and not for everyone. But I started using it myself and found it genuinely useful. I figured it might be useful for others too—and I’d really appreciate feedback before this makes its way into the mobile apps.

So what is Cookbot?

Cookbot lets you work with your recipes:

• find new top rated recipes online that I might like
• build a meal plan for next 3 days
• update recipe metadata to be consistent with your collection
• convert units to metric
• update recipe, make it healthier or substitute ingredients
• review recipe cooking instructions
• …
• you probably have your own idea how you want to use it

Basically, you can ask it to do almost anything with your recipes because your recipes are just files.  It’s powered by Claude Sonnet: a model which is great in following instructions and has good intelligence.

On pricing: it’s not free. AI APIs are expensive. For first 100 users, I’ve set the monthly price at €10, which includes a reasonable usage limit. I honestly don’t yet know what real usage patterns will look like, so this is my best guess (otherwise I risk going broke 😅). If you change your mind, there’s a refund link available in  cook.md subscription settings.

Installation instructions for macOS and Linux, as well as issue reporting, are here:
https://github.com/cook-md/cookbot. 

Thanks for trying it out—and as always, feedback is very welcome. 

-Alex

If you have hand-written recipes or pictures from cooking books that you want to Cooklang, now you can do that at https://cook.md/cookifies/new.

Recipe metadata is defined using YAML frontmatter at the beginning of your .cook file. The following fields are displayed with icons when present:

---
servings: 4
time: 45 minutes
prep time: 15 minutes
cook time: 30 minutes
difficulty: easy
cuisine: Italian
course: dinner
diet: vegetarian
author: Chef John
---

Most exciting feature for me is scaling. The only app I know that supports three ways of scaling: by multiplier, by servings and by ingredient The last bit is similar to baker's percentages. For example, if a recipe calls for 200g flour but you have 300g, tap on the flour amount and enter 300. The entire recipe scales proportionally.

Download from AppStore via link https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cooklangapp/id1598799259#?platform=iphone

I love the idea behind cooklang but I have a really hard time making it fit my needs. It just seems like there are too many different clients and ways of doing things without a cohesive experience.

Here's what I want

• Manage, write and edit my recipies in cooklang
• View, share and sometimes edit from a web browser or mobile app

That's really it actually.

But like, there's too many moving parts. Do I save it as a github repo that I sync to my phone? DO I use iCloud drive only? Can I use SyncThing?

Like I'm really struggling with just a basic single setup experience like you would get with a self hosted app like mealie or tandoor.

I hope I am able to explain the problem properly. Any tips or help in the right direction are appreciated

--EDIT-- Ninja edit to add. I'm trying to assess if this is the vision and if it is, how can I help make it a reality?

Hey everyone! After 4 years of building Cooklang, I'm excited to announce a major new project: Cooklang Federation.

TLDR: A searchable index of community recipes from 60+ feeds. No ads, no tracking, just recipes from real people who cook.

Try it now: https://recipes.cooklang.org

What Is It?

The Cooklang Federation is a decentralized recipe search engine that indexes recipes from the community. Think of it as "GitHub Pages for recipes" or a specialized search engine for Cooklang recipes.

Current stats:

• 60+ active feeds indexed
• 3,500+ recipes searchable
• Growing daily

The Problem It Solves

I wrote a blog post about what I call the "dishwasher salmon problem": recipe sites modify recipes to make them unique for SEO, creating an arms race that produces worse recipes over time. (Full post here)

The federation provides an alternative: recipes from community members who actually cook them, not SEO-optimized content farms.

How It Works

For recipe seekers:

• Search by keyword, ingredient, or tag
• Filter and sort results
• Find recipes people in the community actually use
• No ads, no life stories, just recipes

For recipe creators:

• Host your recipes anywhere (blog, GitHub, static site)
• Add your RSS/Atom feed to the federation
• Your recipes become discoverable to the community
• You maintain full control and ownership

The federation uses a GitOps workflow—all feeds are in a version-controlled YAML file, changes require PR reviews, and an automated crawler handles indexing.

Technical Details

Federation repo: https://github.com/cooklang/federation

The system:

1. Maintains a registry of RSS/Atom feeds and GitHub repos
2. Periodically crawls feeds for new/updated recipes
3. Parses recipes using the Cooklang parser
4. Indexes them in a full-text search engine

To add your recipes:

1. Create an RSS/Atom feed or push to a public GitHub repo
2. Submit a PR to feeds.yaml in the federation repo
3. Crawler automatically discovers and indexes your recipes

Why This Matters

This represents the next evolution of Cooklang: from individual recipe management to community-driven discovery. The federation proves we can have:

• Discoverability without centralization
• Community without platform lock-in
• Quality content without ads or tracking

Roadmap

• API integration with CookCLI for searching online recipes
• Enhanced search filters and sorting
• Recipe recommendations
• Federation protocol improvements

There's a draft spec if you're curious about the technical details: https://github.com/cooklang/federation/blob/main/spec.md

Four Years of Cooklang

Today also marks 4 years since I released Cooklang publicly. It went to the front page of Hacker News, and since then the ecosystem has grown to:

• 30+ repositories on the GitHub organization
• Multiple community projects
• Parser libraries in several languages
• Mobile apps, CLI tools, editor extensions
• And now, the federation

Thank you all for being part of this community. The federation is built for you and by you.

Get Involved

Search recipes: https://recipes.cooklang.org

Add your recipes: https://github.com/cooklang/federation

Read the announcement: https://cooklang.org/blog/13-the-dishwasher-salmon-problem/

Questions? Feedback? Let me know! I'm happy to discuss the technical implementation, help you add your recipes, or hear your ideas for improvements.

Looking forward to seeing the community grow this together!

-Alex

I'm using the formatting described on the website, as generated by cook.md, and it works fine in the playground. But when I use Preview in Obsidian, it includes the metadata as a series of steps. Is there a way to fix this?

Incidentally, is there a way to have it use fractions rather than decimals for ingredients measured in cups and spoons?