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A comic archive web server.

Project description

Codex

A comic archive browser and reader.

✨ Features

  • Codex is a web server, not a desktop or mobile app.
  • Full text search of metadata and bookmarks.
  • Filter and sort on all comic metadata and unread status per user.
  • Browse a tree of publishers, imprints, series, volumes, or your own folder hierarchy.
  • Read comics in a variety of aspect ratios that fit your screen.
  • Per user bookmarking. You get per browser bookmarks even before you make an account.
  • Watches the filesystem and automatically imports new or changed comics.
  • Private Libraries accessible only to certain groups of users.
  • Reads CBZ, CBR, CBT, and PDF formatted comics.

Examples

  • Filter by Story Arc and Unread, Order by Publish Date to create an event reading list.
  • Filter by Unread and Order by Added Time to see your latest unread comics.
  • Search by your favorite character to find their appearances across different comics.

👀 Demonstration

You may browse a live demo server to get a feel for Codex.

📰 News

Codex has a NEWS file to summarize changes that affect users.

📦 Installation

Install & Run with Docker

Run the official Docker Image. Instructions for running the docker image are on the Docker Hub README. This is the recommended way to run Codex.

You'll then want to read the Administration section of this document.

Install & Run as a Native Application

You can also run Codex as a natively installed python application with pip.

Wheel Build Dependencies

You'll need to install these system dependencies before installing Codex.

macOS
brew install jpeg libffi libyaml libzip openssl poppler python unrar xapian
Linux
Debian based (e.g. Ubuntu)
apt install build-essential libffi-dev libjpeg-dev libssl-dev libxapian30 libyaml-dev poppler-utils python3-pip python3-xapian zlib1g-dev
Alpine
apk add bsd-compat-headers build-base jpeg-dev libffi-dev openssl-dev poppler-utils xapian-bindings-python3 xapian-core yaml-dev zlib-dev
Install unrar Runtime Dependency on Linux

Codex requires unrar to read cbr formatted comic archives. Unrar is often not packaged for Linux, but here are some instructions: How to install unrar in Linux

Unrar as packaged for Alpine Linux v3.14 seems to work on Alpine v3.15

Windows

Codex should work on Windows, but I do not understand the binary requirements. I suggest using the other operating system package lists as a guide. If you get it working, please help me replace this section with something useful.

In the mean time, Windows users will have the easiest experience relying on Docker.

Install Codex with pip

You may now install Codex with pip

pip3 install codex

Run Codex Natively

pip should install the codex binary on your path. Run

codex

and then navigate to http://localhost:9810/

👑 Administration

Change the Admin password

The first thing you should do is log in as the admin user and change the admin password.

Navigate to the Admin Panel

  • Click the hamburger menu ☰ to open the browser settings drawer.
  • Log in as the 'admin' user. The default administator password is also 'admin'.
  • Navigate to the Admin Panel by clicking on its link in the browser settings drawer after you have logged in.
In the Admin Panel, Change the Password
  • Navigate to the AUTHENTICATION AND AUTHORIZATION Users panel.
  • Select the admin user.
  • Change the admin password using the small "this form" link in the password section.
  • You may also change the admin user's name or anything else.
  • You may grant other users admin privileges by making them staff.

Adding Comic Libraries

The second thing you will want to do is log in as an Administrator and add one or more comic libraries.

From the Admin Panel, Add Comic Libraries

  • Navigate to the CODEX Libraries Panel in the Admin Panel
  • Add a Library with the "ADD LIBRARY +" button in the upper right.

Reset the admin password

If you forget all your superuser passwords, you may restore the original default admin account by running codex with the CODEX_RESET_ADMIN environment variable set.

CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 codex

or, if using Docker:

docker run -e CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 -v <host path to config>/config:/config ajslater/codex

Private Libraries

In the Admin Panel you may configure private libraries that are only accessible to specific groups.

A library with no groups is accessible to every user including anonymous users.

A library with any groups is accessible only to users who are in those groups.

Use the Groups admin panel to create groups and the Users admin panel to add and remove users to groups.

PDFs

Codex only reads PDF metadata from the filename. If you decide to include PDFs in your comic library, I recommend taking time to rename your files so Codex can find some metadata. Codex recognizes several file naming schemes. This one has good results:

{series} v{volume} #{issue} {title} ({year}) {ignored}.pdf

⚙️ Configuration

Config Dir

The default config directory is config/ directly under the working directory you run codex from. You may specify an alternate config directory with the environment variable CODEX_CONFIG_DIR.

The config directory contains a file named hypercorn.toml where you can specify ports and bind addresses. If no hypercorn.toml is present Codex copies a default one to that directory on startup.

The default values for the config options are:

bind = ["0.0.0.0:9810"]
quick_bind = ["0.0.0.0:9810"]
root_path = "/codex"
max_db_ops = 100000

The config directory also holds the main sqlite database, the Xapian search index, a Django cache and comic book cover thumbnails.

Environment Variables

  • LOGLEVEL will change how verbose codex's logging is. Valid values are ERROR, WARNING, INFO, VERBOSE, DEBUG. The default is INFO.
  • TIMEZONE or TZ will explicitly the timezone in long format (e.g. "America/Los Angeles"). This is useful inside Docker because codex cannot automatically detect the host machine's timezone.
  • CODEX_CONFIG_DIR will set the path to codex config directory. Defaults to $CWD/config
  • CODEX_RESET_ADMIN=1 will reset the admin user and its password to defaults when codex starts.
  • CODEX_SKIP_INTEGRITY_CHECK will skip the database integrity repair that runs when codex starts.

Reverse Proxy

nginx is often used as a TLS terminator and subpath proxy.

Here's an example nginx config with a subpath named '/codex'.

    # HTTP
    proxy_set_header  Host              $http_host;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Host  $server_name;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Port  $server_port;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header  X-Scheme          $scheme;

    # Websockets
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade"

    # This example uses a docker container named 'codex' at sub-path /codex
    # Use a valid IP or resolvable host name for other configurations.
    location /codex {
        proxy_pass  http://codex:9810;
    }

Specify a reverse proxy sub path (if you have one) in config/hypercorn.toml

root_path = "/codex"

Nginx Reverse Proxy 502 when container refreshes

Nginx requires a special trick to refresh dns when linked Docker containers recreate. See this nginx with dynamix upstreams article.

📖 Usage

Sessions & Accounts

Once your administrator has added some comic libraries, you may browse and read comics. Codex will remember your preferences, bookmarks and progress in the browser session. Codex destroys anonymous sessions and bookmarks after 60 days. To preserve these settings across browsers and after sessions expire, you may register an account with a username and password. You will have to contact your administrator to reset your password if you forget it.

🔎 Search Help

Codex's metadata search engine has it's own help page.

🩺 Troubleshooting

Logs

Codex collects its logs in the config/logs directory. Take a look to see what th e server is doing.

You can change how much codex logs by setting the LOGLEVEL environment variable. By default this level is INFO. To see more messages run codex like:

LOGLEVEL=VERBOSE codex

To see a great deal of noisy messages from dependencies try:

LOGLEVEL=DEBUG codex

Watching Filesystem Events with Docker

Codex tries to watch for filesystem events to instantly update your comic libraries when they change on disk. But these native filesystem events are not translated between macOS & Windows Docker hosts and the Docker Linux container. If you find that your installation is not updating to filesystem changes instantly, you might try enabling polling for the affected libraries and decreasing the poll_every value in the Admin console to a frequency that suits you.

Emergency Database Repair

If the database becomes corrupt, Codex includes a facitlity to rebuild the database. Place a file named rebuild_db in your Codex config directory like so:

  touch config/rebuild_db

Shut down and restart Codex.

The next time Codex starts it will back up the existing database and try to rebuild it. The database lives in the config directory as the file config/db.sqlite3. If this procedure goes kablooey, you may recover the original database at config/db.sqlite3.backup.

Bulk Database Updates Fail

I've tested Codex's bulk database updater to batch 100,000 filesystem events at a time. With enough RAM Codex could probably batch much more. But if you find that updating large batches of comics are failing, consider setting a the max_db_ops value in hypercorn.toml to a lower value. 1000 will probably still be pretty fast, for instance.

🐛 Bug Reports

Issues and feature requests are best filed on the Github issue tracker.

By the generosity of the good people of Mylar, I and other Codex users may be found answering questions on the Mylar Discord. Please use the #codex-support channel to ask for help with Codex.

🚫 Out of Scope

  • I have no intention of making this an eBook reader.
  • I think metadata editing would be better placed in a comic manager than a reader.

📚Alternatives

  • Komga has light metadata editing.
  • Kavita has light metadata filtering/editing and supports comics and eBooks.
  • Ubooquity reads both comics and eBooks.
  • Mylar is the best comic book manager which also has a built in reader.
  • Comictagger is a comic metadata editor. It comes with a powerful command line and desktop GUI.

🛠 Develop

Codex is a Django Python webserver with a VueJS front end.

/codex/codex/ is the main django app which provides the webserver and database.

/codex/frontend/ is where the vuejs frontend lives.

/codex/dev-env-setup.sh will install development dependencies.

/codex/dev-ttabs.sh will run the three or four different servers recommended for development in terminal tabs.

/codex/dev-codex.sh runs the main Django server. Set the DEBUG environment variable to activate debug mode: DEBUG=1 ./run.sh. This also lets you run the server without collecting static files for production and with a hot reloading frontend. I recommend setting LOGLEVEL=VERBOSE for development as well.

Links

🙏🏻 Special Thanks

  • Thanks to Aurélien Mazurie for allowing me to use the PyPi name 'codex'.
  • Thanks to the good people of #mylar for continuous feedback and comic ecosystem education.

😊 Enjoy

These simple people have managed to tap into the spiritual forces that mystics and yogis spend literal lifetimes seeking. I feel... ...I feel...

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