Self-host kcal
v0.9.0Personal food nutrition journal tracking calories and macros
- Stars
- 355
- RAM
- 2GB
- Port
- 9000 (PHP-FPM)
- Requires
- MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL
kcalapp/kcal
What is kcal?
kcal is a self-hosted personal nutrition journal for logging foods, recipes, and daily intake. It lets you track calories and macronutrients (fat, carbs, protein) plus cholesterol and sodium, using US volume units and gram weights. Foods and recipes are shared across all users on the instance, while journal entries, goals, and meals stay private per user. You can set multiple daily calorie/macro targets with weekday defaults and per-day overrides, and organize intake across up to eight custom meals. The recipe view is kept clean for easy reading while cooking. Deployment options include Docker Compose (recommended), a manual Ubuntu guide, Laravel Sail, and VS Code Dev Containers. The stack requires PHP 8.4, a MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL database, and optionally Redis, Elasticsearch or Algolia for search, plus AWS S3 for image storage. No external food APIs are used, keeping data local.
Should you self-host kcal?
kcal scores 47/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #10 of 18 in Recipe Management. It has 355 GitHub stars.
It shipped 1 stable release in the past year. The latest, v0.9.0, came out on 24 October 2026.
Setup is moderate: expect some configuration beyond a single command. An official Docker image is available. It is MPL-2.0-licensed and written mostly in PHP.
Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is Mealie (75/100, 13 709 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See kcal vs Mealie side by side.
Features
- Food journal
- Food tracking
- Goal Setting
- Meal Planning
- Media storage options
- Multiple search backends
- Privacy-focused
- Recipe Management
- Tagging and search
kcal README
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