Audio Book Shelf

AudioBookShelf is a Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server.

It is possible to install ABS on bare-metal. They provide prebuilt packages for Debian, Redhat/CentOS and NixOS. But i am on Gentoo, so i decided against downloading a deb or an rpm package but go the containers way instead.

As usual, you need to create the audiobookshelf user but be careful to assign it to the media group so that it can access all the audiobooks and podcasts of your collection,:

useradd -d /data/daemons/audiobookshelf -m -g media audiobookshelf

Then, as user audiobookshelf, create the following docker compose yaml (see here):

docker-compose.yml

version: "3.7"
services:
  audiobookshelf:
    image: ghcr.io/advplyr/audiobookshelf:latest
    ports:
      - 13378:80
    volumes:
      - /data/Audiobooks/:/audiobooks
      - /data/Podcasts:/podcasts
      - /data/daemons/audiobookshelf/config:/config
      - /data/Metadata:/metadata
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Rome

Set a proper port (13378)for your needs, one that is free from all your other services. Double check the various volumes to point to your media collection properly. Also set your TimeZone (TZ) appropriately.

Now ensure your folders do exist:

mkdir /data/Podcasts
mkdir /data/Audiobooks
mkdir /data/Metadata
chown audiobookshelf:media -R /data/Podcasts /data/Audiobooks /data/Metadata
su - audiobookshelf
mkdir config

And then pull the images:

su - audiobookshelf
podman compose pull

This page is a collection of reverse proxy setups for AudioBookShelf.

This is my recomended one for NGINX:

audiobookshelf.conf

server {
        server_name podcast.gardiol.org;
        listen 8443 ssl; # external access
        listen 443 ssl; # internal access

        access_log /var/log/nginx/podcast.gardiol.org_access_log main;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/podcast.gardiol.org_error_log info;

        location / {
                     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For    $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                     proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
                     proxy_set_header  Host              $host;
                     proxy_set_header Upgrade            $http_upgrade;
                     proxy_set_header Connection         "upgrade";

                     proxy_http_version                  1.1;

                     proxy_pass                          http://127.0.0.1:13378;
                     proxy_redirect                      http:// https://;
                   }

        include org.certbot.conf;
}

Unfortunately AudioBookShelf at this time does not support yet sub-paths, so you will need to host it on a subdomain.

To start it, and set it up on boot, as usual follow my indications Using Containers on Gentoo, so link the user-containers init script:

ln -s /etc/init.d/user-containers /etc/init.d/user-containers.audiobookshelf

and create the following config file:

/etc/conf.d/user-containers.audiobookshelf

USER=audiobookshelf
DESCRIPTION="The audiobooks and podcast server"

Add the service to the default runlevel and start it now:

rc-update add user-containers.audiobookshelf default
rc-service user-containers.audiobookshelf start

Since it's using pdoman, stop the service then, as user audiobookshelf, run:

podman compose pull

and restart the service.