Installing Calibre PHP

(These are mostly notes to myself!)

I love Calibre, it's the perfect eBook management tool. It comes with a built in WWW server so you can easily access your library on the go. The only problem is that this really only works if you have a single machine dedicated to Calibre. For various reasons, I don't have a single machine.

I have a desktop, laptop, and server. The Calibre Library is just a database with a set of files and folders - so all three machines sync via DropBox. As long as I don't have the Calibre program open on my desktop and laptop at the same time, everything is hunky-dory.

However, having Calibre running on the server buggers everything up. So, I'm using a separate program - Calibre-PHP Content Server.

Installation was relatively simple, assuming you've already got apache and PHP installed, you'll also need GD, SQLite3, and Smarty.

This was how I installed them on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install smarty php5-gd php5-sqlite php5-sqlite3sqlite3

Configuration is slightly confusing. Copy the config_default.php to config_local.php and edit it.

$config['library_dir'] = '/data/Dropbox/eBooks/Calibre Library';
$config['smarty_dir'] = '/data/smarty-cache';
$config['smarty'] = '/usr/share/php/smarty';

The library directory must be readable to the webserver (chmod a+r) and all the directories above it have to be searchable (chmod a+x).

The "smarty_dir" is where the cache is stored. It needs two sub-folders, smarty_cache and smarty_templates_c. Both of these directories must be writable by the webserver.

That should be it. There's help available at the official help thread.