Codex

A comic archive browser and reader.

✨ Features

• Codex is a web server.
• GPLv3 Licenced.
• Full text search of metadata and bookmarks.
• Filter and sort on all comic metadata and unread status per user.
• Browse a tree of Publishers, Imprints, Series, Volumes, or your own folder hierarchy, or by tagged Story Arc.
• Read comics in a variety of aspect ratios and directions that fit your screen.
• Watches the filesystem and automatically imports new or changed comics.
• Anonymous browsing and reading or reigistered users only, to your preference.
• Per user bookmarking & settings, even before you make an account.
• Private Libraries accessible only to certain groups of users.
• Reads CBZ, CBR, CBT, and PDF formatted comics.
• Syndication with OPDS 1 & 2, streaming, search and authentication.
• Add custom covers to Folders, Publishers, Imprints, Series, and Story Arcs.
• Runs in 1GB of RAM, faster with more.

Examples

• Filter by Story Arc and Unread, Order by Publish Date to create an event reading list.
• Filter by Unread and Order by Added Time to see your latest unread comics.
• Search by your favorite character to find their appearances across different comics.

👀 Demonstration

You may browse a live demo server to get a feel for Codex.

📜 News

Codex has a NEWS file to summarize changes that affect users.

📦 Installation

Install & Run with Docker

Run the official Docker Image. Instructions for running the docker image are on the Docker Hub README. This is the recommended way to run Codex.

You'll then want to read the Administration section of this document.

Install & Run on HomeAssistant server

If you have a HomeAssistant server, Codex can be installed with the following steps :

• Add the https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons repository by clicking here
• Install the addon : click here to automatically open the addon store, then install the addon
• Customize addon options, then then start the add-on.

Install & Run as a Native Application

You can also run Codex as a natively installed python application with pip.

Binary Dependencies

You'll need to install the appropriate system dependencies for your platform before installing Codex.

Linux Dependencies

Debian Dependencies

...and Ubuntu, Mint, MX, Window Subsystem for Linux, and others.

apt install build-essential libimagequant0 libjpeg-turbo8 libopenjp2-7 libssl libyaml-0-2 libtiff6 libwebp7 python3-dev python3-pip mupdf sqlite3 unrar zlib1g

Versions of packages like libjpeg, libssl, libtiff may differ between flavors and versions of your distribution. If the package versions listed in the example above are not available, try searching for ones that are with apt-cache or aptitude.

apt-cache search libjpeg-turbo

Alpine Dependencies

apk add bsd-compat-headers build-base jpeg-dev libffi-dev libwebp openssl-dev sqlite yaml-dev zlib-dev

Install unrar Runtime Dependency on non-debian Linux

Codex requires unrar to read CBR formatted comic archives. Unrar is often not packaged for Linux, but here are some instructions: How to install unrar in Linux

Unrar as packaged for Alpine Linux v3.14 seems to work on Alpine v3.15+

macOS Dependencies

Using Homebrew:

brew install jpeg libffi libyaml libzip openssl python sqlite unrar webp

Windows Dependencies

Windows users are encouraged to use Docker to run Codex, but it will also run natively on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Installation instructions are in the Native Windows Dependencies Installation Document.

Run Codex Natively

Once you have installed codex, the codex binary should be on your path. To start codex, run:

codex

Use Codex

Once installed and running you may navigate to http://localhost:9810/

👑 Administration

Navigate to the Admin Panel

• Click the hamburger menu ☰ to open the browser settings drawer.
• Log in as the 'admin' user. The default administrator password is also 'admin'.
• Navigate to the Admin Panel by clicking on its link in the browser settings drawer after you have logged in.

Change the Admin password

The first thing you should do is log in as the admin user and change the admin password.

• Navigate to the Admin Panel as described above.
• Select the Users tab.
• Change the admin user's password using the small lock button.
• You may also change the admin user's name with the edit button.
• You may create other users and grant them admin privileges by making them staff.

Add Comic Libraries

The second thing you will want to do is log in as an Administrator and add one or more comic libraries.

• Navigate to the Admin Panel as described above.
• Select the Libraries tab in the Admin Panel
• Add a Library with the "+ LIBRARY" button in the upper left.

Reset the admin password

If you forget all your superuser passwords, you may restore the original default admin account by running codex with the CODEX_RESET_ADMIN environment variable set.

CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 codex

or, if using Docker:

docker run -e CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 -v host-parent-dir/config:/config ajslater/codex

Private Libraries

In the Admin Panel you may configure private libraries that are only accessible to specific groups.

A library with no groups is accessible to every user including anonymous users.

A library with any groups is accessible only to users who are in those groups.

Use the Groups admin panel to create groups and the Users admin panel to add and remove users to groups.

Include and Exclude Groups

Codex can make groups for libraries that exclude groups of users or exclude everyone and include only certain groups of users.

PDF Metadata

Codex reads PDF metadata from the filename, PDF metadata fields and also many formats of common complex comic metadata if they are embedded in the PDF keywords field.

If you decide to include PDFs in your comic library, I recommend taking time to rename your files so Codex can find some metadata. Codex recognizes several file naming schemes. This one has good results:

{series} v{volume} #{issue} {title} ({year}) {ignored}.pdf

Complex comic metadata, such as ComicInfo.xml, can be also be embedded in the keywords field by using the comicbox command line tool. Codex will read this data because it relies on comicbox internally. Not many people use comicbox or embedded metadata in PDFs in this fashion, so you likely won't find it unless you've added it yourself.

🗝️ API with Key Access

Codex has a limited number of API endpoints available with API Key Access. The API Key is available on the admin/stats tab.

🎛️ Configuration

Config Dir

The default config directory is config/ directly under the working directory you run codex from. You may specify an alternate config directory with the environment variable CODEX_CONFIG_DIR.

The config directory contains a file named hypercorn.toml where you can specify ports and bind addresses. If no hypercorn.toml is present Codex copies a default one to that directory on startup.

The default values for the config options are:

bind = ["0.0.0.0:9810"]
quick_bind = ["0.0.0.0:9810"]
root_path = "/codex"

The config directory also holds the main sqlite database, the Whoosh search index, a Django cache and comic book cover thumbnails.

Environment Variables

General

• TIMEZONE or TZ will explicitly set the timezone in long format (e.g. "America/Los Angeles"). This is useful inside Docker because codex cannot automatically detect the host machine's timezone.
• CODEX_CONFIG_DIR will set the path to codex config directory. Defaults to $CWD/config
• CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 will reset the admin user and its password to defaults when codex starts.
• CODEX_FIX_FOREIGN_KEYS=1 will check for and try to repair illegal foreign keys on startup.
• CODEX_INTEGRITY_CHECK=1 will perform database integrity check on startup.
• CODEX_FTS_INTEGRITY_CHECK=1 will perform an integrity check on the full text search index.
• CODEX_FTS_REBUILD=1 will rebuild the full text search index.
• DEBUG_TRANSFORM will show verbose information about how the comicbox library reads all archive metadata sources and transforms it into a the comicbox schema.

Logging

• LOGLEVEL will change how verbose codex's logging is. Valid values are ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG. The default is INFO.
• CODEX_LOG_DIR sets a custom directory for saving logfiles. Defaults to $CODEX_CONFIG_DIR/logs
• CODEX_LOG_TO_FILE=0 will not log to files.
• CODEX_LOG_TO_CONSOLE=0 will not log to the console.

Throttling

Codex contains some experimental throttling controls. The value supplied to these variables will be interpreted as the maximum number of allowed requests per minute. For example, the following settings would limit each described group to 2 queries per second.

• CODEX_THROTTLE_ANON=30 Anonymous users
• CODEX_THROTTLE_USER=30 Authenticated users
• CODEX_THROTTLE_OPDS=30 The OPDS v1 & v2 APIs (Panels uses this for search)
• CODEX_THROTTLE_OPENSEARCH=30 The OPDS v1 Opensearch API

Reverse Proxy

nginx is often used as a TLS terminator and subpath proxy.

Here's an example nginx config with a subpath named '/codex'.

# HTTP
proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header   X-Scheme $scheme;
# Websockets
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header   Upgrade $http_upgrade;

proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade" location /codex {
  proxy_pass       http://codex:9810;
  # Codex reads http basic authentication.
  # If the nginx credentials are different than codex credentials use this line to
  #   not forward the authorization.
  proxy_set_header Authorization "";
}

Specify a reverse proxy sub path (if you have one) in config/hypercorn.toml

root_path = "/codex"

Nginx Reverse Proxy 502 when container refreshes

Nginx requires a special trick to refresh dns when linked Docker containers recreate. See this nginx with dynamix upstreams article.

Restricted Memory Environments

Codex can run with as little as 1GB available RAM. Large batch jobs –like importing and indexing tens of thousands of comics at once– will run faster the more memory is available to Codex. The biggest gains in speed happen when you increase memory up to about 6GB. Codex batch jobs do get faster the more memory it has above 6GB, but with diminishing returns.

If you must run Codex in an admin restricted memory environment you might want to temporarily give Codex a lot of memory to run a very large import job and then restrict it for normal operation.

📖 Use

👤 Sessions & Accounts

Once your administrator has added some comic libraries, you may browse and read comics. Codex will remember your preferences, bookmarks and progress in the browser session. Codex destroys anonymous sessions and bookmarks after 60 days. To preserve these settings across browsers and after sessions expire, you may register an account with a username and password. You will have to contact your administrator to reset your password if you forget it.

ᯤ OPDS

Codex supports OPDS syndication and OPDS streaming. You may find the OPDS url in the side drawer. It should take the form:

http(s)://host.tld(:9810)(/root_path)/opds/v1.2/

or

http(s)://host.tld(:9810)(/root_path)/opds/v2.0/

OPDS 2.0 support is experimental and not widely or well supported by clients. OPDS 2.0 book readers exist, but I am not yet aware of an OPDS 2.0 comic reader.

Clients

• iOS has Panels, PocketBooks, KYBook 3, and Chunky Comic Reader
• Android has Moon+ and Librera

Kybook 3 does not seem to support http basic authentication, so Cbbodex users are not supported.

HTTP Basic Authentication

If you wish to access OPDS as your Codex User. You will have to add your username and password to the URL. Some OPDS clients do not asssist you with authentication. In that case the OPDS url will look like:

http(s)://username:password@host.tld(:9810)(/root_path)/opds/v1.2/

Supported OPDS Specifications

• OPDS 1.2
• OPDS-PSE 1.2
• OPDS Authentication 1.0
• OpenSearch 1.1
• OPDS 2.0 (draft)

🩺 Troubleshooting

📒 Logs

Codex collects its logs in the config/logs directory. Take a look to see what th e server is doing.

You can change how much codex logs by setting the LOGLEVEL environment variable. By default this level is INFO. To see more verbose messages, run codex like:

LOGLEVEL=DEBUG codex

Watching Filesystem Events with Docker

Codex tries to watch for filesystem events to instantly update your comic libraries when they change on disk. But these native filesystem events are not translated between macOS & Windows Docker hosts and the Docker Linux container. If you find that your installation is not updating to filesystem changes instantly, you might try enabling polling for the affected libraries and decreasing the poll_every value in the Admin console to a frequency that suits you.

Emergency Database Repair

If the database becomes corrupt, Codex includes a facility to rebuild the database. Place a file named rebuild_db in your Codex config directory like so:

touch config/rebuild_db

Shut down and restart Codex.

The next time Codex starts it will back up the existing database and try to rebuild it. The database lives in the config directory as the file config/db.sqlite3. If this procedure goes kablooey, you may recover the original database at config/backups/codex.sqlite3.before-rebuild. Codex will remove the rebuild_db file.

📚Alternatives

• Kavita has light metadata filtering/editing, supports comics, eBooks, and features for manga.
• Komga has light metadata editing.
• Ubooquity reads both comics and eBooks.
• Mylar is the best comic book manager which also has a built in reader.
• Comictagger is a comic metadata editor. It comes with a powerful command line and desktop GUI.

🤝 Contributing

🐛 Bug Reports

Issues and feature requests are best filed on the Github issue tracker.

🚫 Out of Scope

• I have no intention of making this an eBook reader.
• I think metadata editing would be better placed in a comic manager than a reader.

🛠 Develop

Codex is a Django Python webserver with a VueJS front end.

/codex/codex/ is the main django app which provides the webserver and database.

/codex/frontend/ is where the vuejs frontend lives.

Most of Codex development is now controlled through the Makefile. Type make for a list of commands.

💬 Support

By the generosity of the good people of Mylar, I and other Codex users answer questions on the Mylar Discord. Please use the #codex-support channel to ask for help with Codex.

🔗 Links

• Docker Image
• PyPi Package
• GitHub Project

🙏🏻 Special Thanks

• Thanks to Aurélien Mazurie for allowing me to use the PyPi name 'codex'.
• To ProfessionalTart for providing native Windows installation instructions.
• Thanks to the good people of #mylar for continuous feedback and comic ecosystem education.

😊 Enjoy