Food Diary · Hayden Griffin

A calorie and macro diary that lives in your own Home Assistant, with a native iPhone app that makes logging a meal a photo, a barcode or a sentence.

Most food trackers keep your diary on someone else's server. This one stores every food, goal and saved meal in Home Assistant, with sensors you can chart and automate on. The iPhone app is a fast front end to it, with no account and no data of its own.

What's in the repo

Path	What it is
`custom_components/food_diary`	The Home Assistant integration: the diary, goals, sensors, 24 services, a webhook and voice intents. Installable through HACS.
`ios/`	Food, the SwiftUI iPhone app, with widgets, Control Center controls, a share extension and two-way Apple Health sync.
`custom_sentences/`	Optional Assist sentences: "log two eggs on toast for breakfast", "how many calories have I got left?"
`docs/integration.md`	The full reference: options, entities, every service with its fields and responses, and the sensor contracts, and the interface for another integration to provide recipes and a meal plan.

The app

The full feature list, build steps and signing notes are in ios/README.md.

How it works

Home Assistant is the source of truth. The app calls food_diary.* services through the REST API as the signed-in user, so each person in the house gets their own diary and their own goals.
AI is pluggable. Photos of meals, nutrition labels and typed descriptions are estimated through Home Assistant's AI Task entity, so you choose the model and pay for it directly. Barcodes go to Open Food Facts. Neither is needed to log by hand.
Apple Health both ways. Food is written to Health as food correlations and kept in step with edits and deletes. Activity, rings and sleep are read back to sit beside the food.
Plans become entries. If you keep a meal plan in Home Assistant, point the integration at it and planned meals appear in the diary as estimates you can confirm or change, sides included. A plan can follow the diary, so deleting or moving a planned meal changes the plan too. A background check flags recipe numbers that look wrong.
Unknown is not zero. A macro nobody gave is marked unknown rather than stored as a real 0, and a day says which totals are incomplete.
Works without signal. Foods with known numbers queue on the phone and go in when Home Assistant is reachable.
Retries are safe, newer edits win. Logging takes an optional client_id, so a double tap or a resent request makes one entry; entries carry a revision, and background AI work never overwrites a change made while it was thinking (details).

Getting started

Install the integration. In HACS, add https://github.com/HaydenGriffin/ha-food-diary as a custom repository (category Integration), install Food Diary and restart. Or copy custom_components/food_diary into your config folder.
Add a diary. Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → Food Diary, once per person. Setting up an AI Task entity first gives you photo, label and text logging.
Build the app from ios/ with your own Apple developer team, then sign in to your Home Assistant.
Optional: copy custom_sentences/en/food_diary.yaml into your config for voice logging, and connect a meal plan sensor (contract).

You don't need the app to use the diary: every feature is a service, so dashboards, automations and Assist can drive it too.

Development

# Integration
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements_test.txt
pytest

# App (see ios/README.md for signing)
cd ios && cp Config/Local.xcconfig.example Config/Local.xcconfig && xcodegen && open Food.xcodeproj

The UI tests run against a mock Home Assistant (ios/tools/mock_ha.py) with demo data. The images above are rendered from those tests' screenshots by tools/showcase.

Background

I built this for my own household: a replacement for a subscription food tracker that keeps our data at home and fits into the rest of our Home Assistant setup. This is the public cut of it, with the house-specific parts removed.

Support

Food Diary is free and open source. If it made keeping your diary easier, you can buy me a coffee. Bug reports and pull requests are just as welcome.

License

MIT