Building

For developers. More in DEVELOPING.md in the repository.

Rebuild the package

tools/gzreader/package-kindle.sh koreader-kindle-legacy-v2026.07.1.zip out/   # Kindle 2, DX, 3
tools/gzreader/package-kindle.sh koreader-kindle-v2026.07.1.zip out/          # Kindle 4, Kindle Touch
tools/gzreader/package-kindle.sh koreader-kindlehf-v2026.07.1.zip out/        # touch, firmware 5.16.3+
tools/gzreader/package-kindle.sh koreader-kindlepw2-v2026.07.1.zip out/       # touch, firmware 5.6.1–5.16.2

The branch changes only Lua and shell scripts, so the script overlays it onto the official release built from the same tag rather than rebuilding the native toolchain.

It then precompiles every Lua file under frontend/, plugins/ and common/ to LuaJIT bytecode with the release's own luajit (run through qemu-arm-static; needs qemu-user-static, libc6-armel-cross and libgcc-s1-armel-cross, or libc6-armhf-cross for the kindlehf package; GZ_LUAJIT can name another package's luajit of the same version instead: the bytecode is the same), keeping the .lua names and debug info (line numbers, upvalue names, source paths), so loading skips parsing. Without qemu it warns and ships source. GZ_BYTECODE=0 turns it off.

Publishing a release

Publishing an update is just making a GitHub release:

1. Bump GZREADER_VERSION and add an entry to plugins/gzreader.koplugin/gzreader_changelog.lua, push. Each line is { short = "…", text = "…" }: short for the What's new screen (a few words), text for the changelog and the release notes.
2. On GitHub: Releases → Draft a new release → tag v<version> (for example v1.0.4; v.1.0.4 also works) → Publish.

The "GZreader release packages" workflow then builds and attaches the full installs (gzreader-kindle-legacy-<version>.zip, gzreader-kindle-<version>.zip, gzreader-kindlehf-<version>.zip, gzreader-kindlepw2-<version>.zip) and gzreader-update.zip (what every Kindle downloads, ~6 MB: Lua only, the same for all of them). If a release has no attached files, Kindles use the release's source code zip instead (~9 MB), taking only frontend/, reader.lua, koreader.sh and the installed plugins from it.