codex 0.7.4

A comic archive web server.

Codex

Codex is a comic archive browser and reader.

✨ Features

• Codex is a web server, not a desktop or mobile app.
• Per user bookmarking. You get per browser bookmarks even before you make an account.
• 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.
• Watches the filesystem and automatically imports new or changed 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

All dependencies are bundled in 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 python

Linux

Debian based (e.g. Ubuntu)

apt install build-essential libffi-dev libjpeg-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev python3-pip zlib1g-dev

Alpine

apk add bsd-compat-headers build-base jpeg-dev libffi-dev openssl-dev yaml-dev zlib-dev

Install unrar Runtime Dependency

Codex requires unrar to read cbr formatted comic archives.

Linux

How to install unrar in Linux

macOS

brew install unrar

Install Codex with pip

Finally, you may 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 need to do is to log in as an Administrator and change the admin password.

• Log in with the ⋮ menu in the upper right of the browse view. The default administator username/password is admin/admin.
• Navigate to the Admin Panel by selecting it from under the three dots menu after you have logged in.
• Navigate to the Users panel.
• Select the admin user.
• Change the admin password using the tiny "this form" link in the password section.
• You may also change the admin user's name or anything else.

Adding Comic Libraries

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

• Log in with any superuser (such as the default adimin account) using the ⋮ menu in the upper right of the browse view.
• Navigate to the Admin Panel by selecting it from under the three dots menu after you have logged in.
• Navigate to the Codex API Librarys (sic) on 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

⚙️Configuration

Config Dir

The default config directory is named 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 hypercorn config hypercorn.toml where you can specify ports and bind addresses. If no hypercorn.toml is present a default one is copied 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, a django cache and comic book cover thumbnails generated when comics are imported. Reimport a comic or an entire library to regenereate these 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 mostly 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 the config/hypercorn.toml

root_path = "/codex"

Nginx Reverse Proxy 502 when container is refreshed.

Nginx requires a special trick to refresh dns when linked Docker containers are recreated. 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. Sessions last 60 days at which point they are destroyed. 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.

🩺 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 (probably too many) noisy messages try:

LOGLEVEL=DEBUG codex

Watching Filesystem Events with Docker

Codex tries to watch for filesystem events to instantly update your Libraries when they are changed 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

Codex's bulk database updater has been tested to usually work batching 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 are best filed here on github. However I and other brave Codex testers may also sometimes be found on IRC in the Mylar support channels.

🚀 Roadmap

Next Up

1. Full text search
2. OPDS API

Out of Scope

• I have no intention of making this an eBook reader like Ubooquity.
• I am not interested in this becoming a sophisticated comic manager like Mylar. I am also thinking more and more that metadata editing belongs in a manager and not in a reader like Codex.

📚Alternatives

• Komga has light metadata editing and full text search of metadata.
• Ubooquity is a good looking comic webserver. It also reads eBooks.
• Mylar is probably the best comic book manager and also has a built in reader.
• Comictagger is not really a reader, but seems to be the best comic metadata editor. It comes with a powerful command line and useful desktop GUI.

🛠 Develop

Codex is a Django Python webserver with a VueJS front end. This is my first ever Javascript frontend. In retrospect I wish I'd known about FastAPI when I started, that looks nice. But I'm pretty satisfied with VueJS.

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

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

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

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

/codex/run.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.

Links

• Docker Image
• PyPi Package
• GitHub Project

🙏🏻 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!