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Just a short follow up to the previous article How Did I Setup Calibre/Calibre-Web for eBooks. I had a couple of people ask/comment about running this from a Raspberry Pi. Since I had a Pi 3 sitting here I thought I would give it a try and document the differences. Once you get it setup, it should work pretty much the same, but there were two differences in the install process.

First of all, the install script from the Cailbre site doesn't work because the Rasperry Pi uses the ARM architecture instead of x86. Luckily, if you are using Raspbian on your Pi, there is a Calibre build in the standard repositories. Or you can build it from source. Secondly, I ran into problems when running the latest code from the Calibre-Web repository. I am not sure if that is a general issue due to ongoing work in the current branch, or if something was introduced that specifically caused an issue on the Pi. It could also be a compatibility issue if the version of Calibre in the Raspbian repository is older, as I didn't dig too deep. Either way, going back to the 0.6.11 tag on Calibre-Web solved the issue.

Here are all the commands needed to get a basic setup going on an up to date Raspian install. These steps just put everything in folders under the home directory. You may want to change this for a more permanent setup.

#update package database and install Calibre
sudo apt update
sudo apt install calibre

#Create basic Calibre database with a single book I downloaded
mkdir Calibre
calibredb add ~/Downloads/book.epub --with-library ~/Calibre/

#Test start of built in Calibre server (available at http://localhost:8080)
/usr/bin/calibre-server --with-library ~/Calibre

#Clone the 0.6.11 branch of Calibre-Web and install prerequisites
git clone --branch 0.6.11 https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
cd calibre-web
pip3 install --system --target vendor -r requirements.txt

#Start Calibre-Web (available at http://localhost:8083)
python3 cps.py