I’m a syseng in restaurant management, and I recently found a stash of 800+ old recipes saved as raw HTML5 files on one of my servers. I tried migrating them to popular self-hosted managers like Mealie and Tandoor, but spent a whole day fighting imports and bloated setups. I also realized most tools treat recipes just as sterile inventory data.

So I built Zest to scratch my own itch. The philosophy is: We don't save recipes. We save the memories around the table.

It’s designed to be absurdly lightweight and easy to deploy on a Proxmox LXC or a Raspberry Pi.

The stack:

Backend: FastAPI + SQLite (Everything runs inside one single container, no external DB).

Frontend: Vanilla JS (ES Modules) + HTML + Tailwind. No Node.js, no Webpack, zero build steps.

Infrastructure: Local volumes for persistence.

Key features:

Memories: A food diary. Link photos, dates, and locations to recipes.

Local EXIF parsing: Pure JS local parsing for photo metadata + OpenStreetMap reverse geocoding.

Smart Cooking Mode: Fullscreen step-by-step with auto-detected timers via regex and Wake Lock API so your screen doesn't sleep.

Public sharing: Generate secure URLs or export beautiful Moment Cards (via Pillow) to share with family without them needing an account.

Live demo (resets every 6h, seeded with examples): https://demo.myzest.app

I've successfully migrated my 814 recipes and it runs incredibly fast. I'd love to hear your feedback on the code architecture and the "no build tools" approach.