Installing calibre-web, in a Docker container, on a Ubuntu VM, running in TrueNAS

January 8, 2021 Software Tech calibre calibre-web docker freenas truenas ubuntu

Damn, that was a long, drawn out title….

Basics:

As of this writing, I’m running TrueNAS 12.2
While I really like TrueNAS, TrueNAS/FreeNAS doesn't support Docker containers.
The TrueNAS team is working on TrueNAS SCALE, which is Linux-based, and support Docker containers, but it’s still in alpha.
Once TrueNAS SCALE has reached maturity, I'll most likely switch to it. Update: I switched to Ubuntu Server instead.
Right now, I have an Ubuntu Server virtual machine running on my TrueNAS server.
On that Ubuntu virtual machine, I'm running Docker.
In a Docker container, I run the calibre-web server.
I have my Calibre database, from the desktop app, mounted in a NFS share (/mnt/VD01/calibreDB/).
I have calibre-web configured to use the DB above.
For portability reasons, I have calibre-web's config/settings in the same NFS mount (/mnt/VD01/calibreDB/config/).

Steps:

Install Ubuntu server (I used 20.04).
Update/upgrade/reboot apt packages:
```
sudo apt-get update
```
```
sudo apt-get upgrade
```
If there are any “held back” packages, especially since this is a fresh install:
```
sudo apt-get --with-new-pkgs upgrade
```
Change timezone to my timezone (Ubuntu server 20.04 uses UTC by default):
```
sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Denver
```

Install docker, docker compose, NFS common (to mount NFS shares), and basic networking tools (for usage/troubleshooting):

sudo apt-get install -y net-tools nfs-common docker-compose apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common

Add calibre DB as a NFS mount (assuming your calibre DB is on 192.168.1.201):

sudo su

mkdir /mnt/calibreDB

echo "192.168.1.201:/mnt/VD01/calibreDB /mnt/calibreDB nfs rsize=32768,wsize=32768,timeo=14,intr" >> /etc/fstab

mount -a

ls -l /mnt/calibreDB

Note: You need to be root, not just using sudo, when running the echo command into /etc/fstab.

Configure docker to be run by a non-root user:
```
sudo groupadd docker
```
```
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
```
Log out, then log back in, so the new user permissions are applied.
Make sure everything docker-related works:
```
docker run hello-world
```

Create the docker compose yaml file for calibre-web:

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  calibre-web:
    image: ghcr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web
    container_name: calibre-web
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Denver
      - DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/calibre-web:calibre
    volumes:
      - /mnt/calibreDB/config:/config
      - /mnt/calibreDB:/books
    ports:
      - 8083:8083
    restart: unless-stopped

Download/build/run docker image for calibre-web:
```
docker-compose -f ./calibre-web.yaml up -d
```

Post install

Wait a few minutes for the container to download/install the necessary packages, then connect to http://[host IP]:8083

If you want to view the logs on the container, especially while waiting for it to download/install packages:

docker logs calibre-web

To connect to the container:

docker exec-it calibre-web /bin/bash

References

Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/

calibre-web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

calibre-web Docker with Calibre layer https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-calibre-web/tree/calibre

TrueNAS https://www.truenas.com/

TrueNAS SCALE https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/