Calibre Web Automated

CalibreWebAutomated (CWA) Making Calibre-Web your dream, all-in-one self-hosted digital library solution. Provide Calibre with CalibreWeb together to have a perfect e-book management platform.

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

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

You will need also the proper folders setup:

mkdir /data/Books/cwa_config
mkdir /data/Books/cwa_ingest
mkdir /data/Books/library
mkdir /data/Books/cwa_plugins
chown cwa:media -R /data/Books/*

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

docker-compose.yml

services:
  calibre-web-automated:
    image: crocodilestick/calibre-web-automated:latest
    container_name: calibre-web-automated
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Brussel
      - HARDCOVER_TOKEN=[[ see below ]]
      - NETWORK_SHARE_MODE=false
      - CWA_PORT_OVERRIDE=8083
    volumes:
      - /data/ebooks/cwa_config:/config
      - /data/ebooks/cwa_ingest:/cwa-book-ingest
      - /data/ebooks/library:/calibre-library
      - /data/ebooks/cwa_plugins:/config/.config/calibre/plugins
    ports:
      - 7083:8083
    networks:
      - cwa-net

networks:
  cwa-net: {}

Set a proper port (7083)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.

Pull the images:

su - cwa
podman compose pull

Setup your API token, see this page and beware that this is evolving fast.

This is my recomended setup for NGINX:

cwa.conf

server {
server {
        server_name books.mydomain.com;
        listen 8443 ssl;
        listen 443 ssl;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/books.mydomain.com_access_log main;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/books.mydomain.com_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         $connection_upgrade;

                     proxy_http_version                  1.1;

                     proxy_pass                          http://127.0.0.1:7083;
                     proxy_redirect                      http:// https://;
                   }

        include com.mydomain/certbot.conf;
}

Unfortunately CWA 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.cwa

and create the following config file:

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

USER=cwa
DESCRIPTION="The cwa ebook server"

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

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

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

podman compose pull

and restart the service.