Recipes

Some apps are a single container. updock infers everything it needs from the image. Other apps need a friend: WordPress needs a database, Nextcloud needs MariaDB. You cannot guess that from the WordPress image alone.

Recipes are small curated definitions for these multi-service apps. When you run updock wordpress, updock recognizes the recipe, scaffolds both services into one project, wires them together, and asks for shared values (like the database password) once.

Recipes are data, not code, so they are easy to add and contribute.

Using a recipe

Just run updock with the recipe name:

updock wordpress

If a recipe matches the name, updock uses the recipe flow. If not, it falls back to the single-image flow and tells you which path it took.

Built-in recipes

Recipe	Services
wordpress	WordPress + MySQL
ghost	Ghost + MySQL
nextcloud	Nextcloud + MariaDB
gitea	Gitea + PostgreSQL
n8n	n8n + PostgreSQL
plausible	Plausible + PostgreSQL + ClickHouse

These are embedded in the binary, so they work offline.

Recipe format

A recipe is a YAML file with three blocks: meta, prompts, and services. Shared values are defined once in prompts and referenced as ${VAR} in any service. Here is the shape (trimmed):

meta:
  name: wordpress
  description: WordPress with MySQL database
  version: "1.0"
  tags: [cms, blog, php]

prompts:
  - name: DB_PASSWORD
    description: Database password
    required: true
    secret: true
    generate: password      # updock generates a strong value
  - name: WP_PORT
    description: WordPress HTTP port
    default: "8080"
    type: port

services:
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress
    default_tag: latest
    ports:
      - "${WP_PORT}:80"
    environment:
      WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: "${DB_PASSWORD}"
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: mysql
    default_tag: "8.0"
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "${DB_PASSWORD}"

Notice DB_PASSWORD appears in both services. It is asked once and substituted everywhere. Prompts marked secret: true are masked in output and written only to .env; with generate: password updock creates a strong random value for you.

Adding your own recipe

You can drop your own recipes in:

~/.local/share/updock/recipes/<name>.yaml

(or $XDG_DATA_HOME/updock/recipes/ if that variable is set). A user recipe with the same meta.name as a built-in one overrides it. updock validates every recipe on load: required fields must be present, every service needs an image, and every ${VAR} reference must resolve to a defined prompt.

Contributing a recipe

To add a recipe to the built-in catalog for everyone, contribute it upstream. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the recipe contribution flow.