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!
- 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!
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.
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": "[email protected]",
"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!