CalibreWeb

ASP.NET Core web-app for browsing and downloading ebooks stored in a Calibre database.

CalibreWeb works similar to the built-in Calibre content server: It displays your ebooks stored in a Calibre database on a HTML page.

If you want to give someone access to you ebook catalogue, but don't want to permanently run Calibre on your Windows web-server, then CalibreWeb is the right thing for you!

Features

• Display cover images
• Display Calibre metadata (title, author, language and description)
• Download of ebooks in all available formats
• List of authors
• Display all books of an author
• Optionally protect e-books with a login page

Note that you cannot use CalibreWeb to read your ebooks in a web-browser!

Getting started

Build CalibreWeb yourself from source or download the latest binary release.

Follow Microsoft documentation on how to host a .NET 6.0 web-app on IIS (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/iis/?view=aspnetcore-6.0).

Edit appsettings.json and configure the path to your Calibre database:

  "Calibre": {
    "CataloguePath": "C:\\inetpub\\CalibreDB",
    "RequireLogin": false
  }

With "Calibre database" I mean the directory containing metadata.db and all sub-directories containing your ebooks. Important: Make sure the IIS application pool user has write access to this directory, otherwise the web-app will be very slow!

If you use the default configuration with "RequireLogin": false everyone has access to your e-books. If you want to restrict access to certain users, read the following paragraph.

Require login

If you set the parameter "RequireLogin": true in appsettings.json, all users accessing the web page are required to login with a username and password. Users are configured in a text-file users.json:

[
  {
    "name": "john.doe@example.org",
    "password": "123456",
    "salt": "",
    "role": "download"
  },
  {
    ...
  }
]

If you add a new user, enter the password in plaintext and add an empty "salt" value. After you have restarted the application, a random "salt" will be generated and the plaintext password will be replaced with it's hash.

Possible values for "role":

• <empty> = view list of all books but downloading is not allowed
• download = view a list of all books and show download links
• admin = same as download (reserved for future use)

Important: You need to restart the application pool every time you have changed the users.json file!