PDFShare

PDFShare is a single-page application for PDF viewing, downloading, and local distributing. Once setup, it enables one to move around and store their PDFs.

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PDFShare consists of a single infinite-scroll styled view which displays the PDFs. For each PDF, it is possible to see the name of the PDF, an option to download it, and a SHA256 checksum to validate its integrity.

Configuration

To setup PDFShare, it is important that the following files have been properly configured:

• The config.py file for PDFShare backend.
• The .env file for Vue.
• The .env file for Docker.

PDFShare Backend

The config.py file under /backend/pdfshare/app stores configuration details and constants used for the backend. Settings inside of config.py include:

• BOOKS_DIR_SYSTEM= path where PDFs are stored.
• COVERS_DIR_SYSTEM= path where PDF png covers are stored.
• PORT= port of flask server. Note changing this will necessitates changes to
  gunicorn_config.py, Dockerfile, and docker-compose.yml files.
• MONGO_HOST= host of the MongoDB server that storages the book metadata.
• MONGO_PORT= port of the MongoDB server that storages the book metadata.

VueJS Env

The .env needs to be created by copying the contents of .env.template, which can be found inside of /frontend, into it. Settings inside of .env include:

• VUE_APP_BASE_URL= base url of the PDFShare backend. For example, assuming the the PORT within config.py is set to 9000 and the host machine has the ip address of 10.0.1.11, then this variable should be set to http://10.0.1.11:9000.

Docker Env

The .env needs to be created by copying the contents of .env.template, which can be found inside of /, into it. Settings inside of .env include:

• PDF_DIR= path where PDFs are stored. Should be the same as the BOOKS_DIR_SYSTEM variable inside of config.py.
• SSL_CERT_DIR= path where SSL certs are stored if enabled. Key pair is expected to be called pdfshare.crt and pdfshare.key.
• NGINX_CONF= the nginx.conf to use. If SSL enabled, then set it to tlsnginx.conf. Otherwise, set to nginx.conf.

PDF Book Scanner Daemon(pdfbsd)

As an optimization over having book cover generation done during a user request (which led to slow page renders during such events), the logic was instead moved into a daemon process that listens to filesystem events against the Books directory. To simplify IPC between PDFShare and pdfbsd, MongoDB was used. This way, when pdfbsd discovers a new unique book, its saves the metadata as a record in the mappings collection under books db from which PDFShare then reads to determine which books exist. This change ensures that requests times are consist across all edge cases.

Installation

To install and run PDFShare, is is important that Docker and Docker Compose are installed on the system. Likewise, it is assumed that NodeJS is also present on the system. PDFShare will listen on port 7140.

With Docker

1. Clone the repo and setup all of the config as required.
2. Go into /frontend and build Vue.js frontend by running npm run build.
3. Build Docker containers docker-compose build
4. Start PDFShare with docker-compose up -d.

Adding Books During Runtime

Nothing special needs to be done when adding books while PDFShare is running. Simply place the PDF in the required directory depending on the installation format. From there, pdfbsd will generate a cover for this book and the book should appear once the site is refreshed.