Setting up your own ebook library – Mouflons and Penguins

This article is about setting up you own ebook library with support for the OPDS catalog format . The COPS ebook catalog can read a Calibre library and expose it as a website. It is developed on PHP.

Prerequisites

Prepare a Linux system. In this guide we are using Ubuntu 14.04.4.
Have a cops.example.com DNS A record pointing to the IP of your server.

Install necessary packages

$ sudo apt-get -y samba nginx php5-fpm php5-gd php5-sqlite php5-json php5-intl git

Setup a SAMBA share

Samba is needed for sharing the Calibre library directory with the library administrator. Alternatively you could use NFS or even OwnCloud.

Note

It is a security risk to expose Samba on a public server. Restrict it through firewall or use OwnCloud instead.

Tweak the Samba configuration file (/etc/samba/smb.conf):

#  unix password sync = yes
   unix password sync = no

#  pam password change = yes
   pam password change = no

Add a Samba share for calibre (/etc/samba/smb.conf):

[calibre$]
path = /srv/calibre
valid users = calibre
write list = calibre
read only = no

Restart Samba services:

$ sudo service smbd restart ; sudo service nmbd restart

Add the calibre user:

$ useradd -m -d /srv/calibre -s /usr/sbin/nologin calibre
$ smbpasswd -a calibre

Setup Calibre

Now you should setup Calibre on your PC. On Debian/Ubuntu:
```
$ sudo apt-get -y install calibre
```
Windows users can download it from here:

http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows
Configure Calibre to use the calibre share as its catalog:
- You can "mount" the calibre share on Linux or "map" the share on Windows.
- Create an ebook Directory under the calibre share.
- Create a new Calibre library inside the ebook directory. From the Calibre menu:
  - Callibre Library –> Switch/create library -> Create an empty Library at the new location and fill the path in the "New Location" text field.
- If you get an error about "Corrupted database" just click ‘Yes" to rebuilt it.
- Start adding books

Setup COPS OPDS

Download the software:

$ mkdir /var/www
$ cd /var/www
$ git clone https://github.com/seblucas/cops.git

Setup COPS:

Under the /var/www/cops/ directory, copy the config_default.php.example to config_default.php:

$ cp config_local.php.example config_local.php

Make the following changes in config_default.php:

< ?php
    if (!isset($config))
        $config = array();

    /*
     * The directory containing calibre's metadata.db file, with sub-directories
     * containing all the formats.
     * BEWARE : it has to end with a /
     */
    $config['calibre_directory'] = '/srv/calibre/ebooks/';

    /*
     * Catalog's title
     */
    $config['cops_title_default'] = 'My Ebook Portal';

    $config['calibre_internal_directory'] = '/ebooks/';

    $config['cops_full_url'] = 'cops.example.com';

    $config['cops_x_accel_redirect'] = 'X-Accel-Redirect';

    /*
     * use URL rewriting for downloading of ebook in HTML catalog
     * See README for more information
     *  1 : enable
     *  0 : disable
     */
    $config['cops_use_url_rewriting'] = '1';

Setup nginx

Create an /etc/nginx/sites-available/cops.example.com

server {

    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    server_name cops.example.com;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/cops.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/cops.error.log;
    root   /var/www/cops;
    #index feed.php;
    index index.php;

    #Useful only for Kobo reader
    location /download/ {
          rewrite ^/download/(\d+)/(\d+)/.*\.(.*)$ /fetch.php?data=$1&db=$2&type=$3 last;
          rewrite ^/download/(\d+)/.*\.(.*)$ /fetch.php?data=$1&type=$2 last;
          break;
        }

        #Can break loading the images - if you don't see anything, comment
        location ~ ^/images.*\.(gif|png|ico|jpg)$ {
                expires 31d;
        }
        #Can also break loading the images, comment if it happens
        location ~ .(js|css|eot|svg|woff|ttf)$ {
                expires 31d;
        }

    #Not necessarily correct, it depends on distro.
    location ~ \.php$ {
       try_files $uri =404;
       include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
       fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
       fastcgi_pass    unix:/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    }

    location /ebooks {
        root /srv/calibre;
        internal;
    }
}

Note:

The feed.php setting was redirecting me to an XML site with this error: This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below. So I am using index.php instead, as the index file.

Enable the cops.example.com site and disable the default:

$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/cops.example.com
$ sudo unlink default

Restart nginx and php5-fpm:

$ sudo service php5-fpm restart ; sudo service nginx restart

Change permissions to let nginx write to the library:

$ usermod -a -G calibre www-data
$ chmod -R g+w /srv/calibre/ebooks/

Now you can navigate to http://cops.example.com and enjoy your newly created ebook library!

References

https://github.com/seblucas/cops
http://blog.slucas.fr/en/oss/calibre-opds-php-server
https://github.com/seblucas/cops/wiki/Full-example-with-Nginx