Read 2026-10-04
mealie-recipes/mealie: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in mealie-recipes/mealie's code and history at 62b8e35: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | adequate |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | strong |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | adequate |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
LICENSE: Relicensed: MIT → AGPL-3.0 (2022-05-09).github/pull_request_template.md:70: states a policy on AI-generated contributions
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
adequatefrontend/app/components/Domain/Recipe/RecipePage/RecipePageParts/RecipePageInstructions.vue is 1,130 lines, 17× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 64 lines. 1 file exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 1,130. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
frontend/app/components/Domain/Recipe/RecipePage/RecipePageParts/RecipePageInstructions.vue:1 — 1,130 lines (17× median) |
3 base images float: no version, or `latest`
adequate3 of 7 `FROM` lines in product Dockerfiles name an image without a version, or with `latest`. Each build pulls whatever the registry serves that day, so the image that ships can change without a commit, and last month's build cannot be reproduced. Pin a version, or a digest.
docker/Dockerfile:48 — base image without a version |
docker/Dockerfile:95 — base image without a version |
docker/Dockerfile:126 — base image without a version |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongTests are retried until they pass
adequateThe suite is configured to retry failing tests (tests/e2e/playwright.config.ts). A retry turns a flaky test green without saying why it failed, so a green build means the tests passed eventually. Ask how many retries a typical run needs, and which tests need them.
tests/e2e/playwright.config.ts:19 — test retry |
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongNo finding.
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate2 credential-shaped strings in the tree sit in tests, examples, documentation or local development settings
adequateStrings shaped like credentials appear only where fakes are usual: test fixtures, examples, documentation, placeholders and local stacks. They are almost always fakes. Ask someone to confirm that none of them works anywhere, because a real key in a development file is still a real key.
| 2 cited: AWS access key, where fakes are usual |
1 Dockerfile runs the application as root
adequateNo USER instruction switches away from root, so the process runs with full privileges inside the container. It is a one-line fix and an ordinary expectation, which is why its absence is worth asking about: it usually says more about whether anyone has reviewed the deployment than about this container specifically.
docker/Dockerfile — runs as root |
The build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate15 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.
.github/workflows/build-package.yml:20 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/build-package.yml:30 — action pinned by tag |
8 locked dependencies have published vulnerabilities, 2 high or critical in what ships
adequate8 of 1,603 locked dependencies match 12 published advisories in OSV, 6 of them rated high or critical. A lockfile says which version is installed, not whether the flawed code is reachable from this product, so each needs a look. Most are fixed by an upgrade, and the advisory names the version.
uv.lock — nltk 3.10.3: GHSA-8mgp-746c-j5xp (high) |
frontend/pnpm-lock.yaml — braces 3.0.3: GHSA-vfj7-8cjw-p6xm (high) |
uv.lock — virtualenv 21.7.10: GHSA-94p9-xgh2-xp45 (high), fixed in 21.7.12; a development dependency |
8 places insert HTML from a variable without sanitising it
adequate8 places set HTML from a value that is neither a literal nor passed through a sanitiser. Where the value can come from a user, that is stored cross-site scripting, and it is the first thing a buyer's security review looks for in a frontend.
frontend/app/components/Domain/Recipe/RecipeList.vue:24 — HTML from a variable |
frontend/app/components/Domain/Recipe/RecipePrintView.vue:38 — HTML from a variable |
frontend/app/components/Domain/Recipe/RecipePrintView.vue:94 — HTML from a variable |
Relicensed: MIT → AGPL-3.0 (2022-05-09)
adequateThe root licence changed 1 time(s). The latest terms restrict what users, hosts or a buyer may do in ways the earlier ones did not. Code taken under the old terms stays under them, so both matter in diligence.
9 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 2 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-09-20. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 5 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 3.28.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 6 records name mealie with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2022-32425, CVE-2022-34613, CVE-2022-34615, …).
| 2026-09-20: CVE-2026-94028 (low): A weakness has been identified in mealie-recipes Mealie up to 3.25.1. Affected is the function payload.model_dump of the file mealie/routes/households/controlle |
| 2026-09-18: CVE-2026-93736 (moderate): Mealie before 3.21.0 fails to validate user ownership in the ratings and favorites endpoints, allowing authenticated attackers to read any user's recipe ratings |
| 2026-08-05: CVE-2026-71210 (moderate): Mealie's AsyncSafeTransport SSRF guard (mealie/pkgs/safehttp/transport.py) resolves a target hostname once, checks the resolved IP against private-range rules, |
| 2026-02-11: CVE-2025-70296 (moderate): A stored HTML injection vulnerability in the Recipe Notes rendering component in Mealie 3.3.1 allows remote authenticated users to inject arbitrary HTML, result |
| 2026-02-11: CVE-2025-70297 (moderate): A stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the recipe asset upload and media serving component in Mealie 3.3.1 allows remote authenticated users to in |
Observability & Operations
adequateNo structured logging library is in use
adequateNothing references a structured logging library. Logs that are written to be read by a person are not searchable by a machine, which means incident response here is proportional to how well someone remembers the codebase rather than to what the tooling can find.
| searched 1,548 files for 10 structured logging libraries; 0 matched |
One request cannot be followed through the logs
adequateNothing in the service carries a request or correlation id, and there is no tracing. When a customer reports a failure, the log lines that belong to their request cannot be picked out from everyone else's.
| no request id, correlation id or tracing found |
No error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.
| no error reporter initialised |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on mealie-recipes/mealie: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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