New Groups cannot view existing recipes - Creating a View-Only Group

[ldrach]

Hello,

I have been using mealie a lot lately and I want to add some of my family members to the app. Ideally I would like them to only have view access, so I created another group for view-only. In theory, this seems like it should be pretty simple, but I'm wondering if I am missing something because any time I try to set this group up, they are not able to see the existing recipes I have already created using the admin group.

Mealie Version: 1.5.1
Running in a Docker container

These are the settings I am using for the admin group

Admin:
Private Group: Checked (I have tried checked and unchecked)
Allow users outside of your group you see your recipes: Checked
Show nutritional information: checked
Show recipe assets: checked
Default to landscape view: unchecked
Disable users from commenting on recipes: unchecked
Disable organizing recipe ingredients by units and food: unchecked

These are the settings I am using for the View only role:

View-Only:
Private Group: unchecked (I have tried checked and unchecked)
Allow users outside of your group you see your recipes: Checked (I have tried checked and unchecked)
Show nutritional information: checked
Show recipe assets: checked
Default to landscape view: unchecked
Disable users from commenting on recipes: unchecked
Disable organizing recipe ingredients by units and food: unchecked (I have tried checked and unchecked)

I have also tested this with both an admin and non-admin user with the same results. For some reason, no matter what I do, the View-Only role is never able to see any recipes. If anyone has some insight on the matter, I would appreciate the help! I feel like I have messed around with every possible setting at this point and had no luck!

Thanks!

[michael-genson]

Groups are fully isolated instances; there is no sharing between groups. Currently there is no way to create users that can't create recipes, however you can make your entire instance public which will allow anyone to view recipes without an account (which seems to fit your use case, as long as you don't mind anyone with a link being able to see recipes):

https://docs.mealie.io/documentation/getting-started/usage/permissions-and-public-access/#public-recipe-access

[ldrach]

Hey, thank you for the information! I will probably go ahead and just make the recipes public if that is the case.

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the function of the setting "Allow users outside of your group you see your recipes" then? I think that must have been what confused me!

[michael-genson]

The reason there are two settings is because the "make group private" is sort of a global toggle; if your group is private, all other privacy settings are overridden. The other settings are more fine-tuned (e.g. recipe access)