Flambe API
Import, digitize and manage recipes programmatically. Everything the Flambe apps do, over HTTP.
Flambe turns recipes from anywhere — a URL, a photo of a cookbook page, a block of pasted text — into structured, editable data. The API is the same interface the Flambe apps use, so anything they can do, your integration can do too.
Quickstart
Authenticate and run your first import in about five minutes.
Imports
The flagship capability: URL, image and text into a structured recipe.
API reference
Every public endpoint, generated from the OpenAPI spec.
Built for agents
llms.txt, Markdown for every page, and an MCP server.
How this reference stays true
What the spec guarantees, and the two things it cannot tell you.
What you can build
- Recipe capture — point Flambe at a URL or a photo and get back parsed ingredients, components and steps. See Imports.
- A library — create, update, tag and search recipes, and organize them into collections. See Recipes.
- Planning and shopping — build meal plans and derive grocery lists from them.
- Shared cooking — share a library with a household, or mint an unlisted public link for one recipe. See Households and Sharing.
- Offline-capable clients — sync incrementally with a watermark instead of refetching. See Syncing.
The shape of the API
https://api.flambe.devOne base URL, JSON in and out, bearer-token authenticated. There is no separate sandbox host — use a dedicated test user while you build.
| Convention | Detail |
|---|---|
| Auth | Authorization: Bearer <clerk session jwt> |
| Casing | snake_case, except timer fields, which are camelCase |
| Timestamps | ISO 8601, UTC — 2026-09-10T18:22:04.512Z |
| Ids | UUID v4 strings. Opaque; do not parse them |
| Errors | { "error": "message" }, or { "errors": [...] } on validation failure |
Imports are asynchronous
Creating an import returns 201 immediately with status: "pending".
Extraction happens on a worker and takes seconds to a couple of minutes. Poll
the import or subscribe to the event stream — do not
expect a recipe in the create response.
Service health
Live component status, including per-queue import health, is published at status.flambe.dev. Subscribe there to be emailed when something is degraded.