Calibre WebUI

A simple web ui for the Calibre ebook conversion and library tool.

Installation

Ansible

The role ansible-role-calibrewebui can be used for easy deployment using docker and nginx.

Dependencies

• Calibre: Calibre-webui depends on Calibre to be installed on the system as it operates as a front-end to it.
• Python 3.7 (Not tested with lower versions)
• Python requirements can be installed with: pip install -r requirements.txt

uWSGI

Update the uWSGI configuration file calibre_webui.ini to fit your need.

Make sure threads are enabled, or conversion tasks will not run.

nginx

It is preferred to use a full httpd to serve calibre-webui, rather than exposing uWSGI directly:

location / {
    include uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_pass unix:/var/run/calibre/calibre_webui.sock;
}

systemd

Finally, you may want to run calibre-webui using systemd. More information is available on uWSGI's documentation. If using a virtualenv, make sure to activate it in your execution command.

Configuration

All configuration variables defaults and descriptions can be found in calibre_webui/default_config.py.

You can set and overwrite these variables by setting them in a similarly formatted file under /etc/calibre_webui/calibre_webui.cfg.

It is required to set at least the following variables:

• CALIBRE_LIBRARY_PATH: Set to the path of an existing Calibre library. The directory must contain the metadata.db file
• APP_SECRET_KEY: to a random string

Docker

For ease of use, calibre_webui can be deployed using docker.

Configuration

Create your local calibre_webui.cfg file setting at least:

• APP_SECRET_KEY: to a random string

The variables CALIBRE_LIBRARY_PATH, CALIBRE_TEMP_DIR, CALIBRE_WEBUI_DB_PATH defaults have been preset for Docker use.

Then bind it in your docker-compose to /etc/calibre_webui/calibre_webui.cfg:

services:
  app:
    [...]
    volumes:
    - ./calibre_webui.cfg:/etc/calibre_webui/calibre_webui.cfg:ro

You will also need to update the docker-compose.yml file to update the source of the calibre_library volume to point to a host directory where your library is or will be stores, for example as follows:

volumes:
  - type: bind
  source: /mnt/nfs_share/books
  target: /data/calibre_library

nginx

The container will now listen on a tcp socket on port 8000, use an nginx configuration based on the following to server the content:

server {
  listen 80 default_server;
  listen [::]:80;


  root /var/www/html;

  index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

  server_name calibre.example.com;

  location / {
    include uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_pass localhost:8000;
  }
}

Note: it is advised to increase your client_max_body_size in nginx, as you will most likely be uploading large files to calibre_webui (the default being 1M).