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Calibre Server Installation on a Raspberry Pi

May 26, 2023 — Gregg Szumowski

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 \
--port=8081 --enable-local-write --enable-auth \
/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

Tags: calibre, raspberry-pi, motd