Calibre Web

Calibre Web - Manage your Calibre e-book collection

Calibre Web is a web app providing a clean interface for browsing, reading and downloading eBooks using an existing Calibre database.

Calibre Web comes with the following features:

• Bootstrap 3 HTML5 interface
• full graphical setup
• User management
• Admin interface
• User Interface in english, french, german, polish, simplified chinese, spanish
• OPDS feed for eBook reader apps
• Filter and search by titles, authors, tags, series and language
• Create custom book collection (shelves)
• Support for editing eBook metadata
• Support for converting eBooks from EPUB to Kindle format (mobi/azw)
• Restrict eBook download to logged-in users
• Support for public user registration
• Send eBooks to Kindle devices with the click of a button
• Support for reading eBooks directly in the browser (.txt, .epub, .pdf)
• Upload new books in PDF, epub, fb2 format
• Support for Calibre custom columns
• Fine grained per-user permissions
• Self update capability

If you want to know more you can head over to the Calibre Web project site: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web.

And if you are interested in the original Calibre ebook management tool then look at the project site: https://calibre-ebook.com/.

Features

• running Calibre Web
• automaticaly updated on every (re)start of the container if needed
• no usage of NGINX inside the container, only the Calibre Web application is served as single application without any supervisor
• disabled GoogleDrive/Kobo/GoodReads integrations, ldap, oauth to strip down the image
• support of Calibre ebook-convert tool to convert to MOBI
• Calibre ebook-convert uses glibc and therefore https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc is installed

Hints & Tips

• if you need SSL support similiar to the original Docker Container janeczku/calibre-web then use an additional NGINX or Apache HTTP Server as Reverse-Proxy, e.g see jwilder/nginx-proxy
• for Synology Users - don't map a top-level volume directory from the NAS as /books volume, e.g. /volume1/books because it results into problems with directory permissons. Create instead a subdirectory calibre at /volume1/books and map then /volume1/books/calibre as volume for /books

Configuration at first launch

1. Point your browser to http://hostname:<HTTP PORT> e.g. http://hostname:8083
2. If you want to change location of your Calibre books folder, go to http://hostname:8083/admin/dbconfig and set it to the path of the folder where you mounted your Calibre folder in the container. This is /books by default.

Default admin login:

• Username: admin
• Password: admin123

After successful login change the default password and set the email adress.

To access the OPDS catalog feed, point your Ebook Reader to http://hostname:<HTTP PORT>/opds

Configuration of a converter

at Admin -> Basic Configuration -> E-Book converter you've to set the converter which you want to use:

• for the option Use calibre's ebook converter set the Path to convertertool to /opt/calibre/ebook-convert and at About you will see then Calibre converter ebook-convert (calibre 5.9.0)

Known issue

1. if you map the old/existing app volume like -v /volume1/docker/apps/calibre-web/app:/calibre-web/app then you'll get the following issue at startup

[INFO] Checkout the latest Calibre-Web version ...
[INFO] Autoupdate is active, try to pull the latest sources for Calibre-Web ...
[INFO] ... current git status is
fatal: not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /calibre-web)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).
[INFO] ... pulling sources
fatal: not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /calibre-web)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).
[INFO] ... git status after update is
fatal: not a git repository (or any parent up to mount point /calibre-web)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).

To solve the issue delete the old files at -v /volume1/docker/apps/calibre-web/app:/calibre-web/app before you create and start the container.

Usage

Create the container:

docker create --name=calibre-web --restart=always \
-v <your Calibre books folder>:/books \
[-v <your Calibre Web application folder>:/calibre-web/app] \
[-v <your Calibre Web config folder>:/calibre-web/config \]
[-e APP_REPO=https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web.git \]
[-e APP_BRANCH=master \]
-p <HTTP PORT>:8083 \
svasek/calibre-web

Example:

docker create --name=calibre-web --restart=always \
-v /volume1/books/calibre:/books \
-v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
-p 8083:8083 \
svasek/calibre-web

or

docker create --name=calibre-web --restart=always \
-v /volume1/books/calibre:/books \
-v /volume1/docker/apps/calibre-web/config:/calibre-web/config \
-e TZ=Europe/Prague \
-p 8083:8083 \
svasek/calibre-web

Start the container:

docker start calibre-web

Parameters

Introduction

The parameters are split into two parts which are separated via colon. The left side describes the host and the right side the container. For example a port definition looks like this -p external:internal and defines the port mapping from internal (the container) to external (the host). So -p 8080:80 would expose port 80 from inside the container to be accessible from the host's IP on port 8080. Accessing http://'host':8080 (e.g. http://192.168.0.10:8080) would then show you what's running INSIDE the container on port 80.

Details

• -p 8083 - http port for the web user interface
• -v /books - local path which contains the Calibre books and the necessary metadata.db which holds all collected meta-information of the books
• -v /calibre-web/app - local path for Calibre Web application files; set this volume if you want to use Google Drive
• -v /calibre-web/config - local path for Calibre Web config files, like app.db and gdrive.db
• -e APP_REPO - set it to the Calibre Web GitHub repository; by default it uses https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web.git - optional
• -e APP_BRANCH - set which Calibre Web GitHub repository branch you want to use, master (default branch) - optional

Container Timezone

Just set the enviroment variable TZ :

Examples:

• UTC - this is the default value if no value is set
• Europe/Prague
• America/New_York
• ...

Additional

Shell access whilst the container is running: docker exec -it calibre-web /bin/bash

Upgrade to the latest version of Calibre Web: docker restart calibre-web

To monitor the logs of the container in realtime: docker logs -f calibre-web

To monitor the logs of Calibre Web: docker exec -it calibre-web tail -f /calibre-web/app/calibre-web.log

Show used base image version number of Calibre Web: docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "image.base.version" }}' calibre-web

Show used image version number of Calibre Web: docker inspect -f '{{ index .Config.Labels "image.version" }}' calibre-web

---

For Synology NAS users

Login into the DSM Web Management

• Open the Control Panel
• Control Panel > Privilege > Group and create a new one with the name 'docker'
• add the permissions for the directories 'downloads', 'video' and so on
• disallow the permissons to use the applications
• Control Panel > Privilege > User and create a new on with name 'docker' and assign this user to the group 'docker'

Connect with SSH to your NAS

• after sucessful connection change to the root account via

sudo -i

or

sudo su -

for the password use the same one which was used for the SSH authentication.

• create a 'docker' directory on your volume (if such doesn't exist)

mkdir -p /volume1/docker/
chown root:root /volume1/docker/

• get the Docker image

docker pull svasek/calibre-web

• create a Docker container (take care regarding the user ID and group ID, change timezone and port as needed)

docker create --name=calibre-web --restart=always \
-v /volume1/books/calibre:/books \
-e TZ=Europe/Prague \
-e PGID=65539 -e PUID=1029 \
-p 8083:8083 \
svasek/calibre-web

• check if the Docker container was created successfully

docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                           COMMAND                CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
40cc1bfaf7be        svasek/calibre-web      "/bin/bash -c /init/s" 8 seconds ago       Created 

• start the Docker container

docker start calibre-web