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 add the following lines to your /etc/local.d/80-containers.start:

su - audiobookshelf -c "podman compose up -d"

and to the /etc/local.d/80-containers.stop:

su - audiobookshelf -c "podman compose down"

You can start it now by running the above command in the start file.