Hosting my own eBook server!

Hello there! 

I came across Ubooquity on a YouTube Video. This is perfect! A central library that I can host on my own, or use a cloud service, and bring some of the same features I have learned to enjoy from readers like the kindle reader. Ubooquity will remember where you left off reading, give you the ability to download the book directly, and supports multiple e-book standards.

How to host it? I have a Raspberry Pi running some docker containers. Let’s see if that is an option. Low and behold, thanks to Linux Server I found a docker container that supports ARM, so that supports my Raspberry Pi. It also has a docker-compose file that I can alter and make this work.

Deploying the Docker Container

Using Docker-Compose will pretty much do everything for us as long as we set it up right.

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  ubooquity:
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/ubooquity
    container_name: ubooquity
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Asia/Seoul
      - MAXMEM=1024
    volumes:
      - /media/usbdrive/NAS/Backup/uboquity:/config
      - /media/usbdrive/NAS/Books:/books
    ports:
      - 2202:2202
      - 2203:2203
    restart: unless-stopped

I’ll break some of the things I customized from the example given by Linux Server.

The - TZ=Asia/Seoul should reflect where you are in the world. It is similar to how you choose your timezone when setting up an operating system.

I put the max memory to 1GB since I am running this on a Raspberry Pi - MAXMEM=1024

For file persistence and to save the config and files is where you want to do.

volumes:
      - /media/usbdrive/NAS/Backup/uboquity:/config
      - /media/usbdrive/NAS/Books:/books

The format to keep in mind is you begin with where you want it stored on your local system then : where it is on the container.

The ports are similar to how you map your volumes. It goes host:container. I wasn’t using 2202 or 2203 for anything else, so I left it alone.

I saved this file as docker-compose.yml and always make sure you’re in the same directory as your yml file when trying to use docker-compose.

docker-compose up -d

Accessing Your Website

Now that you have the container up and running you can check to see if it is running. Go to http://ip:2202/ubooquity. This is the port you set in the docker compose file. You should see

You can navigate around, but I would suggest heading to the admin page and set that up. Go to http://ip:2203/ubooquity/admin. This should take you to a website like this.

Set the admin passwords, and you’re in the admin portion. I mainly use this for setting the scan times or launching a new scan to build the actual library.

Great! Now we have everything set up, but there is nothing in there. Remember that portion of the docker-compose file under volumes. You want to copy your e-book collection to the directory you defined earlier. In the example below my books are saved to /media/usbdrive/NAS/Books. Once you have your collection there, go back to your admin page and launch a scan.

That’s it! You now have access to your all of your books through a web browser.