Quartermaster

A personal cookbook for saving Recipes, planning Meals, and keeping Shopping to one useful list.

I built Quartermaster to replace 100+ Recipes scattered across Apple Notes. It now handles the whole weekly loop without turning the kitchen into an inventory system.

Live at useqm.app

How it works

1. Save or import the Recipes you cook.
2. Plan individual Recipes or reusable multi-dish Menus as ordered Meals.
3. Open From Plan on Shopping and pick the Meals and lines to buy for.
4. Keep a short household Staples list; add one from its row to put it on the Next shop.
5. Cook from the Recipe and check off Shopping together in real time.

Recipe cards and Recipe detail stay simple: they show what a Recipe needs, with each ingredient one tap from Shopping. Shopping picked from the Plan starts with the lines matching a Staple unticked and keeps everything else.

Product shape

• Recipes hold the canonical ingredients and instructions.
• Menus are reusable groups of ordered Recipe and note cards.
• Meals are scheduled Recipe items, Menu snapshots, or plain text.
• Staples are household ingredients normally assumed available, kept as a quick-add list: add one and it lands on the Next shop.
• Shopping combines Recipe ingredients, Menu note lines, and manual items without pretending to know exact stock.

AI is optional. It extracts Recipes from text and images, suggests description and time improvements for review, and parses speech. The manual app works without API keys.

Tech stack

Layer	Tech
App	React Router v8, React, Express
Data	Prisma, SQLite, LiteFS
UI	Tailwind CSS v4, Radix UI
Auth	Sessions, email verification, Google OAuth, passkeys
AI	Anthropic Claude, Groq Whisper
Services	Stripe, Tigris-compatible object storage, SSE
Hosting	Fly.io, Docker
Tests	Vitest plus focused Playwright coverage

Bootstrapped from the Epic Stack.

Engineering notes

• Shopping checks are versioned. Every check submits the purchase version it saw, and SQLite triggers advance that version whenever demand changes, so a check can never silently cover an ingredient added after the shopper looked. Retries are safe through one latest request id. Shopping in ARCHITECTURE
• One small machine, run deliberately. SQLite under LiteFS with a static lease on a single Fly Machine, forward-only Prisma migrations with a documented journal dance, nightly offsite backups, and a restore runbook. Deployment and recovery · Restore runbook
• Two watchdogs. One restarts the process when a slow leak has pushed the box toward thrash and a forced GC cannot recover it; the other watches the event loop from a worker thread, since a wedged loop cannot report itself. Both live in server/, each commented with the failure it guards against.

Getting started

Requires Bun >= 1.3.13.

bun install
cp .env.example .env
bun run setup
bun run dev

The development environment mocks Stripe, storage, Google OAuth, and email. See .env.example for optional service configuration.

Docs

• Architecture
• Product terms
• Features
• Design system
• Copy guide
• Database restore runbook
• Development plan
• Architecture decision records
• iOS app
• Agent notes and testing rules

License

MIT