cal-cli

Calorie and macro tracking from the command line, because logging a meal should be one command and not an app with an onboarding flow.

$ cal log "chicken rice" 600 45
Logged: chicken rice, 600 cal, 45g protein

$ cal today
Today (2026-08-30)
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Meal         ┃ Calories ┃ Protein ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ chicken rice │      600 │     45g │
│ Total        │      600 │     45g │
└──────────────┴──────────┴─────────┘
Remaining: 2300 cal / 2900 cal | 145g protein / 190g

Commands

Command	What it does
log <name> <calories> <protein>	Log a meal for today
today	Today's meals, totals, and what's left against your goals (or how far over)
delete <name>	Remove a meal from today by name (case-insensitive)
history	Every logged day, chronologically
weight <lbs>	Log today's weight
progress	Weight history with net change over the tracked period
goal <calories> <protein>	Set daily targets (defaults: 2900 cal, 190g protein)

Install

git clone https://github.com/apollo-2006/cal-cli.git
cd cal-cli

pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py today

To get the cal shorthand used above, alias it:

echo "alias cal='python3 $(pwd)/main.py'" >> ~/.bashrc

The log path is anchored to the script's own directory rather than the working directory, so the alias reads the same log from anywhere.

Storage

Everything lives in one human-readable log.json next to the script: no database, no account, no sync:

{
  "goals": { "calories": 2900, "protein": 190 },
  "2026-05-19": {
    "weight": 178.0,
    "meals": [
      { "name": "chicken rice", "calories": 600, "protein": 45 }
    ]
  }
}

Days written by earlier versions stored a bare list of meals instead of an object. get_day_data normalizes that on read, so old logs keep working without a migration.

Writes go through a temp file and os.replace, so an interrupted save cannot leave the log truncated.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Author

Abir Deol · abirdeol.tech