Calibre Server Installation on a Raspberry Pi

These instructions are for installing the Calibre book management software on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu 20.04 but should work with Raspian or other Debian-derived operating systems. This is just a briefer version of the same instructions that are posted here.

Install the calibre-bin package and its dependencies:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y $ sudo apt install calibre-bin

Create a user to run this program.

$ sudo adduser calibre

Login as the ‘calibre’ user and create some directories:

$ mkdir calibre-library $ mkdir ~/books-to-add

Enable user authentication:

calibre-server –manage-users

Create a service for the Calibre server

[Unit] Description=calibre content server After=network.target [Service] Type=simple User=calibre Group=calibre ExecStart=/usr/bin/calibre-server </code> –port=8081 –enable-local-write –enable-auth </code> /home/calibre/calibre-library [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable the service:

$ sudo systemctl enable calibre-server $ sudo systemctl start calibre-server

Create a cron job to run periodically add books from the books-to-add directory:

*/5 * * * * calibredb add /home/calibre/books-to-add/ -r –with-library http://localhost:8081#calibre-library –username calibre –password ********

Supplemental instructions are here

• Calibre
• Raspberry-Pi
• Motd