Calibre and Calibre-Web Widgets

[deweycd]

Can you please add Calibre and Calibre-Web widgets to your roadmap?

[crispybegs]

+1 for calibre-web

[jagadam97]

@deweycd @crispybegs
is this the homepage for calibre you are requesting for https://calibre-ebook.com/

[crispybegs]

no, i host https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web in a docker container
same as audiobookshelf, but for ebooks

[rtmlp]

Yes. I have been using calibre-web as well and it is similar to audiobookshelf where i use it to read ebooks

[crispybegs]

there's often confusion between calibre and calibre-web. for those who aren't sure of the difference, calibre is a standalone desktop app for managing an ebook library and its metadata. It's very well featured and under constant development.. but it also looks like a software refugee from the early 2000s

it does have its own built-in web server you can enable but jesus christ... who wants to deal with this kind of thing?

On the other hand, Calibre-web is a totally separate docker-hostable app that can either take its content from the Calibre standalone app's database, or can operate entirely on its own as long as you give it a calibre metdata.db file, even if that's just a dummy file. In my case i was previously using calibre standalone but i've left it behind. I copied over the .db it was using and gave that to calibre-web to use.

Calibre-web is basically a decent-looking plex but for ebooks, like so..

[crispybegs]

any chance of calibre-web? thinking pretty much like the komga or audiobookshelf widgets

[gantoine]

Alright I've got a basic widget working gantoine#2

However I'm struggling with authentication; I can't find any docs on API keys, and a Basic <username>:<password> header isn't working out-of-the-box. As a temporary workaround, enabling Allow Reverse Proxy Authentication in calibre-web and setting the header to X-Authenticated-User does the trick (although not very secure).

[crispybegs]

did you make any more progress with this?

[gantoine]

No, I'm hoping someone can come in and sort out the authentication stuff.

[mgrimace]

Could you set reverse proxy authentication to use X-[something]-username and pass along a username specified in a filed within the widget in services.yaml?

I do automatic login via Authentik using X-authentik-username, so when I log-in to Authentik, it passes it along to Calibre-web so I don't need a double-login.

I don't have a good sense of how to implement this for Homepage, just that you can specify specific login accounts for possibly more security.

[crispybegs]

No, I'm hoping someone can come in and sort out the authentication stuff.

shame to have stuff like mealie but not something as widespread as calibre-web

[gantoine]

What we'd need is someone familiar with the calibre-web codebase to add basic/bearer authentication. Short of that I don't see any way of accomplishing this without compromising on basic safety. Which is a shame since I've really wanted to add this to my homepage.

[taos15]

Did you try base64 encode the user and password like adguard does. Ot use Basic username:oassword but rhe username:password need to be base64 encoded.

[gantoine]

What I tried at the time was Basic ${btoa("user:password")} with no luck. However this was a couple months ago and things might have changed since then. I'll give it another shot soon.

[taos15]

I saw a repo using for a different project that need the Basic encoded64UserPassword auth header this: Buffer.from(`username:password`).toString('base64')

[gantoine]

This is the curl I'm trying and the response I get:

curl 'https://<url>/ajax/listbooks' --compressed -H 'Authorization: Basic <base64>'

<title>Redirecting...</title>

Redirecting...

You should be redirected automatically to target URL: /login?next=%2Fajax%2Flistbooks. If not click the link.%

It works fine if I pass in a header with a cookie and the session token 🤷🏼

[gantoine]

Update on this: It took writing a custom proxy and reading the ODPS docs, but I've got it working using username/password! PR here: #1829

[crispybegs]

my guy

[gantoine]

@deweycd Since you opened this discussion and #1829 was just merged in (and will likely be available soon), do you want to mark this as answered and close it?

[shamoon]

Unfortunately the PR for this was reverted pending resolution of #1845

I'll reopen in the meantime

[deweycd]

Thank you everyone for your work on this. I understand the limitations we have run into on this issue and look forward to future changes in Calibre-Web that allow us to pursue this again.

[OzzieIsaacs]

Hi, I'm the maintainer of calibre-web. I'm not sure what exactly you want to archive and how you plan to integrate calibre-web.
Calibre-web has regarding access 3 different ways:

1. The opds feed, which can be only accessed using basic authentication, basic authentication via ldap and reverse proxy authentication
2. The web view. This can be accessed using a "normal" login form, ldap, oauth via google or github or reverse proxy authentication
3. The kobo sync protocal. This can beasses using a autheication bearer, as provided by the kobo sync protocol. Only the requests which are needed by kobo are implemented.

The opds feed defines no field for statistics about the accessed books (as you already found out). From my point of view it's not a good idea to include something like this in the opds feed, as many of the opds feed reader are a bit picky, So if they see something they don't know how to interprete, this can lead to "not working at all" anymore.
Calibre-web offers the about page accessible via the normal web-UI:

You could log in using proper credentials (using a post request to the "/login" route and then load the /stats page and parse the content of it. But I don't know if this is worth the effort.

[gantoine]

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to explain this, as I'm not very familiar with the calibre-web codebase.

The web view. This can be accessed using a "normal" login form, ldap, oauth via google or github or reverse proxy authentication

I assume the json endpoints are internal/only meant to be consumed by the web app (and not some sort of API), so I can understand why they wouldn't be available via basic authentication.

You could log in using proper credentials (using a post request to the "/login" route and then load the /stats page and parse the content of it. But I don't know if this is worth the effort.

I made an attempt at this earlier, but between managing the session and dealing with CSRF tokens it's more trouble then it's worth (as you mentioned).

[OzzieIsaacs]

One additional thing about beeing opds feed compatibel. My feeling is that the readers aren't caring about beeing compatible to the spec, but they try to be compatible to Calibre, so Calibre (the desktop app) sets the real standard.

[OzzieIsaacs]

I'm willing to offer a "/opds/json_stats" route, returning basic statistics about the number of books, authors, tags, series in the library (as already visible on the /stats page in json format (preferably) and accessible via basic authentication.

[shamoon]

That would be great!

[gantoine]

Yes please!

[rtmlp]

Wow. Thanks @OzzieIsaacs for taking time to look into this issues and exploring the options

[OzzieIsaacs]

Please check the newest nightly build of calibre-web, if this is what you expect. you can access "/opds/stats" via basic authentication and get the following json structure returned (the numbers are of course just examples:
{"books": 10, "authors": 11, "categories": 1, "series": 2}

[shamoon]

Amazing, thank you for doing that!

[gantoine]

Sweet thank you!

I pulled the latest nightly version from docker, but I'm getting redirected when trying that endpoint:

curl 'https://calibre_url/opds/stats' -H 'Authorization: Basic Z2Vvcmdlcy1hbnRvaW5lOkdvcGJeaWoyV0dITEIqIVhNa2U3'

<!doctype html>
<html lang=en>
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<h1>Redirecting...</h1>
<p>You should be redirected automatically to the target URL: <a href="http://books.gantoine.com/opds/stats/">http://books.gantoine.com/opds/stats/</a>. If not, click the link.

Other opds endpoints still work with the same token

curl 'https://calibre_url/opds/books' -H 'Authorization: Basic Z2Vvcmdlcy1hbnRvaW5lOkdvcGJeaWoyV0dITEIqIVhNa2U3'

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
  <id>urn:uuid:2853dacf-ed79-42f5-8e8a-a7bb3d1ae6a2</id>
  <updated>2023-08-24T10:43:25+00:00</updated>
  <link rel="self"
        href="/opds/books?"
        type="application/atom+xml;profile=opds-catalog;type=feed;kind=navigation"/>
...

Honestly I might just be doing something wrong when running the nightly build 🤷🏼

calibre:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web:nightly-b3a85ffc-ls107
    container_name: calibre
    restart: unless-stopped
    env_file: .env.shared
    ...

[OzzieIsaacs]

I changed it 3hours ago, the docker build is 6hours old. I think you need to wait a bit…

[gantoine]

Ah that's it, I should have checked the commit history for opds.py 🤦🏼 I'll report back after the next nightly build it released, but looking at the code in the repo it looks to be exactly what we need.

[gantoine]

Ayo it works on the latest nightly build! 🎉

curl 'https://books.gantoine.com/opds/stats' -H 'Authorization: Basic Z2Vvcmdlcy1hbnRvaW5lOkdvcGJeaWoyV0dITEIqIVhNa2U3'

{"books": 85, "authors": 23, "categories": 27, "series": 6}%

[gantoine]

Going to open a new PR with the updated code shortly. Thank you so much @OzzieIsaacs for adding this so quickly!

[crispybegs]

is there also a calibre widget? i just started running it in docker and would be good to have some stats on it

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