LazyLibrarian: another books and audiobooks organizer

LazyLibrarian is a tool to follow authors and grab metadata for all your digital reading needs. It acocmplish the same goals as Readarr, but has a few advantages:

• It works (currently Readarr has issues with metadata providers)
• It can manage books and audiobook from the same instance

In my view, it also has some drawbacks:

• Clumsy UI, doesn't feel very intuitive
• Diverge from the *Arr's looks&feel
• It's more complex to setup properly

I have installed it to match the same collection as Readarr, and i am currently using it over Readarr since the latter is not working, but i plan to switch back to Readarr as soon as it will be again fully operative.

LazyLibrarian must be installed manually since there is no Gentoo ebuild for it, but it's pretty easy with pip.

As usual, you need to create a specific user and set it's home folder to /data/daemons/lazylibrarian and set media as it's main group:

 > useradd -d /data/daemons/lazylibrarian -g media -m lazylibrarian

Using pip directly is discouraged on Gentoo because it can severely break your system. To use pip on Gentoo you need to explicitly enable it for the lazylibrarian user by creating the file /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/.config/pip/pip.conf with this content:

pip.conf

    [global]
    break-system-packages = true
    user = true

Now adapt the lazylibrarian umnask so that any files moved by it will be accessible by the other tools (where needed). Add the following line at the end of /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/.bashrc:

umask 0002
</codeZ>
 
You can now become the //lazylibrarian// user and proceed with the installation using **git**:
<code bash>
 > su - lazylibrarian
 > git clone git clone https://gitlab.com/LazyLibrarian/LazyLibrarian.git

As last step, you need a startup script called /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/lazylibrarian.sh, so create it with the following content:

lazylibrarian.sh

#!/bin/bash
 
cd /data/daemons/lazylibrarian
python LazyLibrarian.py -d

You also want a script to automatically start it at boot, so create the file /etc/local.d/80-lazylibrarian.start with the following content:

lazylibrarian.start

#!/bin/bash
 
start-stop-daemon -b -m -p /var/run/lazylibrarian.pid -n lazylibrarian -u lazylibrarian /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/lazylibrarian.sh

and make them both executable:

 > chmod +x /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/lazylibrarian.sh
 > chmod +x /etc/local.d/80-lazylibrarian.start

That's it, LazyLibrarian is installed, but you will need to configure it before starting.

Before you proceed, you should make LazyLibrarian accessible via the reverse-proxy, so that access, configuration and usage will be simplified from the beginning. Add this file to /etc/nginx/folders:

lazylibrarian.conf

location /lazylibrarian/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5299;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}

Add it to your /etc/nginx/folders/main.conf:

include "folders/lazylibrarian.conf";

and restart nginx:

 > /etc/init.d/nginx restart

There are some configuration that must be perform before actually starting the service.

Edit the file /data/daemons/lazylibrarian/config.ini to set the correct base-url and some more things. Please note that the following lines are only the ones you need to change from the default. Be careful in changind eny other line unless you know what you do:

[GENERAL]
... 
file_perm = 0o664
dir_perm = 0o775
ebook_dir = /data/Books
audio_dir = /data/Audiobooks
download_dir = /data/daemons/nzbget/dst/Books, /data/daemons/deluge/Downloads, /data/daemons/transmission/Downloads
...
[WEBSERVER]
http_proxy = True
http_root = /lazylibrarian

A quick summary of the edits:

• file_perm / dir_perm: changed to ensure all downloaded&moved files are accessible from Readarr as well
• ebook_dir / audio_dir: match your media collection folders
• download_dir: must point to where your downloaders will put downloaded files (more on this later on, see the downloaders pages)
• http_proxy: tell LazyLibrarian you will use a reverse proxy
• http_root: the Base URL of the reverse proxy

Now, start LazyLibrarian:

 > /etc/local.d/80-lazylibrarian.start

All set! LazyLibrarial is running.

In order for LazyLibrarian to benefit from Prowlarr automatic indexers management you need to open http://192.168.0.1/prowlarr in your browser, go to settings → apps and add LazyLinrarian. From the popup window set:

• server: http://localhost:8787/readarr-books
• API Key: grab it from Readarr-books settings → general page and paste it here

Now add a second Readarr (you will need to specify a different name, like Readarr-audiobooks):

• LazyLibrarian server: http://localhost:5299
• API Key: generate it from config → interface page by enabling “Enable API” and “generate” button.

Then go to the Prowlarr indexers page and click on the synchronize all indexers icon.

Configuring LazyLibrarian is quite complex and messy, compared to the *Arr's at least. I will give you some pointers here.

• No pointers at the moment

Please note that you will not yet be able to use LazyLibrarian fully as you have not yet installed any downloader.

Now, head on to install the other services…

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