Where was I? A self-hosted progress tracker for web novels, manhwa and manhua — the things you read across half a dozen different sites and lose your place in.
One Go binary serves the API and the web library; a browser extension captures your position as you read. Your data never leaves machines you own.
Serialised reading is messy. A single series shows up under different titles, on different sites, in different translations. You start something on one platform, pick it up on another where the translation runs further ahead, and now your place is split across three tabs in two browsers on two devices. No single platform tracks across the others — each one only knows its own catalogue — and general trackers like AniList and MAL are catalogues too, not progress tools: they don't know what site you actually read on.
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Opt-in capture. Click the extension button on a chapter page to record where you are. Nothing runs in the background unless you turn on auto-tracking for a specific site, one host at a time (ADR-0012).
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Per-site tracking. Every entry remembers both the chapter number and the site you read it on. Read a series to ch 1402 on one site then continue to ch 1450 on another, and NextChapter keeps both threads — it doesn't collapse them.
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Manual series reassignment. The Beginning After The End on one site is TBATE on another, possibly 오로지 너로 시작되는 on a third. Grab any entry and reassign it to a different (or new) series. Manual override is a first-class feature, not a debugging tool.
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URL-pattern heuristics, with fallback. For known sites the series slug and chapter number come out of the URL automatically. For unknown sites you fill in the details, or build a rule without writing a regex — and any site you have captured from but have no rule for is surfaced with a one-click prompt to add one.
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Companion web library. List your series, mark them reading / completed / on-hold / dropped / plan-to-read, tag them, rate them, and click straight back into the last chapter you read. Each card shows
read till chapter: XX— the highest across every site you've used — and expands into the per-site breakdown. -
Self-hosted. A laptop, a Pi, a VPS. SQLite by default, Postgres if you'd rather.
The image bundles the web UI — one container serves the API and the library.
docker run -d --name nextchapter \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v nextchapter-data:/data \
-e NEXTCHAPTER_DATABASE_URL=sqlite:///data/nextchapter.db \
ghcr.io/rishikesh01/nextchapter:latestOpen http://localhost:8080, register an account, and you're running. Images are multi-arch (linux/amd64, linux/arm64, linux/arm/v7) and run as a non-root user on a distroless base. Every tag is also published as :latest for stable releases, and carries OCI metadata — docker inspect reports the exact version and commit it was built from.
Grab the archive for your platform from the latest release, check it against checksums.txt, extract, and run:
tar -xzf nextchapter_v1.2.3_linux_amd64.tar.gz
cd nextchapter_v1.2.3_linux_amd64
./nextchapterIt listens on :8080 and creates ./nextchapter.db next to itself. The web UI is embedded — no separate web server, no static files to copy. Builds ship for Linux (amd64, arm64, armv7), macOS (Intel, Apple silicon) and Windows.
Needs Go 1.27+, Node 24+ and pnpm 10+.
git clone https://github.com/Rishikesh01/NextChapter.git
cd NextChapter
make setup # Go modules + pnpm workspace
make -C frontend web-embed # build the SPA into the binary
make -C backend build # → backend/bin/nextchapterSkip web-embed and you get an API-only binary that serves a placeholder at / instead of the library. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full development setup.
Not on the Chrome Web Store or AMO — this is a self-hosted tool, so it installs by hand. Download nextchapter-extension-<version>-chrome-mv3.zip or -firefox-mv3.zip from the latest release.
- Chromium (Chrome, Edge, Brave): unzip it, open
chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode, click Load unpacked, pick the folder. The extension ID is pinned, so it survives reloads. - Firefox 128+: open
about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox→ Load Temporary Add-on → pick the zip. (128 is the floor: below it, optional host permissions are silently dropped.)
Then open the extension's options page, enter your server URL, and sign in — it mints its own API token. The extension asks for permission to reach your server's origin at that moment, and asks for nothing at install time.
Every setting is an environment variable. No flags, no config file.
| Variable | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
NEXTCHAPTER_LISTEN_ADDR |
:8080 |
Address to bind (host:port). |
NEXTCHAPTER_DATABASE_URL |
sqlite://./nextchapter.db |
sqlite://<path> or postgres://user:pass@host:5432/db. |
NEXTCHAPTER_LOG_LEVEL |
info |
debug, info, warn, error. |
NEXTCHAPTER_ALLOWED_ORIGINS |
(unset) | Comma-separated CORS allow-list. Unset means same-origin only — correct for the embedded UI. |
NEXTCHAPTER_COOKIE_SECURE |
(inferred) | Forces the session cookie's Secure flag. Set this to true behind TLS — see below. |
NEXTCHAPTER_BOOTSTRAP_USERNAME |
(unset) | Creates the first user on an empty database. Must be set together with the password. |
NEXTCHAPTER_BOOTSTRAP_PASSWORD |
(unset) | At least 8 characters. |
NEXTCHAPTER_VERSION |
(linker-stamped) | Overrides the version reported by /healthz. |
Registration is open regardless of bootstrap — anyone who can reach the server can create an account, so put it behind a network you control or a reverse proxy that authenticates.
Behind TLS, set
NEXTCHAPTER_COOKIE_SECURE=true. The session cookie'sSecureflag is otherwise inferred fromNEXTCHAPTER_ALLOWED_ORIGINS, which a same-origin deployment leaves unset — so a TLS deployment that doesn't set this ships a cookie withoutSecure(ADR-0010 §5).
GET /healthz reports {"status":"ok","version":"v1.2.3"} — the version is stamped at build time, so it tells you exactly which release is running. Interactive API docs are at /swagger/index.html.
Build instructions, the dev loop, the test gates, the release process and the architecture decision records all live in CONTRIBUTING.md.
See LICENSE.