Tandoor Recipe Manager
A Mini Review
Tandoor is a self-hosted open source recipe manager. I have been running it in my YunoHost test server, in order to try it out, for about a year, collecting 21 recipes in it.
Basically I'm not satisfied with it, for my needs.
It's quite nice in some ways but terribly limited to one particular fussy attempt to organise a recipe in a particular way with steps, ingredients categorised by name and quantity, etc. There's no way to include recipes that don't fit this format. No way to include a web page (that doesn't import neatly into this very precise format) or a text document that I wrote or a PDF scan of a paper page. No way even to represent “fuzzy” ingredients like “some herbs of your choice” or “about 2 or 3 cloves of garlic”. Each ingredient has to have a number and a unit specified, and there are only hacky work-arounds like defining the word “some” as a custom unit. So I'm still running it for fun, for a small handful of recipes I imported (sometimes with awkward manual clean-up required) from web sites, while most of my recipes are still on scraps of paper or PDF scans or books or web sites that don't import.
Unfortunately Tandoor doesn't match my use case, which is a need to keep track of all the recipes that I like, no matter what they look like or what they came from.
Until we find a recipe manager that can cope with variety and messiness it's just a toy for me and not really useful.
Tandoor's Strengths
I can see that there are use cases where it might shine, which could be where the goal is to publish a collection of recipes, let's say for a club or a school, where the need is to have a place all the recipes can be found together, and where the effort of inputting them into the prescribed format is worth it. It's in my Awesome FOSS tag for this reason.
Freedom Software Ethics
In terms of open source “freedom software” ethics, Tandoor sits towards the freedom side of the spectrum.
It's open source, and it's got a recipe-hosting subscription business attached: that's all good.
On the other hand, like too many other projects, the development is hosted on Microsoft-Github instead of a freedom-respecting forge. That's a real and present danger to the open source ecosystem: freedom software lives in freedom-respecting software forges. And development discussion is invited inside the proprietary Discord instead of through a freedom-respecting communication protocol: see Discord vs community values.
On the positive side it has its own website at its own domain, tandoor.dev, and some other freedom-respecting resources of its own, for example a no-tracking cookies policy.
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