I put my food diary in the terminal: log meals by text, photo or audio, and pipe the day as JSON

Marat Muslimov — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 04:27:20 +0000

Foodoo is a food diary app for iPhone and Android, and it now has a CLI that talks to the same account: whatever you log in the terminal shows up in the app at once, and the other way round. If you spend your day in a terminal, logging "coffee with oat milk" no longer means picking up your phone.

Install and sign in

curl -fsSL https://foodoo.fit/install.sh | sh     # macOS / Linux
foodoo login

foodoo login shows a QR code and a short code. You confirm it in the Foodoo app (or on foodoo.fit) and the terminal gets a token that opens only your diary, water and statistics. The token lives in ~/.config/foodoo/config.json, readable only by you; foodoo logout, or "Devices and apps" in the app, ends it at once.

The interactive diary

Just run foodoo. Type what you ate in plain words and press Enter: "oatmeal with banana and a flat white". The server reads it and logs the dishes with their numbers.

You can also drop a photo or an audio file into the terminal window: a picture of your plate, or a voice note saying what you had. Commands for the rest:

/today, /day -1 — today, or any day
/water 250 — a glass of water
/portion 2 150 — set the portion of entry 2 to 150 g
/delete 2, /undo
/stats 30 — the last 30 days
/usage, /help

For scripts

Every action is also a plain command:

foodoo add "two eggs and toast"
foodoo add --photo lunch.jpg
foodoo water 300
foodoo today --json
foodoo stats --days 30 --json
foodoo rm <id>

Exit codes are predictable: 0 ok, 1 failed, 2 bad arguments, 3 not signed in. So a cron job, a status-bar widget or a shell prompt segment can read your day without scraping anything, for example a foodoo today --json piped into jq.

Environment knobs: FOODOO_LANG=ru|en, FOODOO_NO_UPDATE=1 (it updates itself once a day otherwise; foodoo update does it now), NO_COLOR, and FOODOO_PIXELS=half|full for how the little pea mascot is drawn.

Why a CLI for a food diary at all

The app's whole idea is that logging should take seconds, because that's the only way people keep doing it. For people who live in a terminal, the fastest place to log is the terminal. The phone still does the parts a terminal can't: the camera, Apple Health, and the "how did that meal make you feel" question after you eat, which over time shows which foods affect your energy and sleep.

Premium is bought only in the app; in the terminal it simply works when you have it.

Docs: https://foodoo.fit/cli
The app: https://foodoo.fit (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android; you can start without an account)

I'd love feedback from people who'd actually use this: which commands are missing, and what you'd want in the JSON output.

DEV Community: Marat Muslimov

I put my food diary in the terminal: log meals by text, photo or audio, and pipe the day as JSON

Install and sign in

The interactive diary

For scripts

Why a CLI for a food diary at all