During a Hackathon in 2015 at Balabit I was involved in a project to overhaul our library. Part of that project was to make sure that the whereabouts of dead-tree books are tracked properly. This script is a piece of that puzzle: it's basically a quick'n'dirty frontend that augments the default web UI (aka "content server") of Calibre and allows people to just enter the location of a book if they borrow it or put it back. It is not authenticated at all -- the system's built on honesty anyway.
As it is 95% just thin wrappers above other tools and practically zero business logic, there are no tests. Also because it's just a nasty hack.
It must be running on the same machine as Calibre does as it needs to interact with its database through the "calibredb" command. One must set up two new custom columns for this to work: "location" and "previous_location": those will be used to track the whereabouts of that book. The easiest way to do that are the following commands:
calibredb add_custom_column location "Current location" text
calibredb add_custom_column last_location "Last location" text
Make sure you copy configuration.py.sample to configuration.py and specify the root URL for Calibre.
The values of the custom fields ("Current location" and "Last location") appear automatically on the Calibre UI, you don't need to do anything to change that. But it'd be great to have a link on that UI this tool so that the user can immediately change the location of a book.
Calibre allows the customization of the UI of the content server but it's a bit tricky. The process is described in the Calibre manual. What you need to do is the following:
- Find the location of the default templates for the content server. If installed from package on an Ubuntu, for
example, they're at
/usr/share/calibre/content_server/ - Find out where's your configuration directory for Calibre located. The easiest way to do that is to go to
Preferences->Advanced->Miscellaneous in Calibre and click Open calibre configuration directory that will bring you there.
On a default Ubuntu install, it's at
~/.config/calibre - Create a directory called
resourcesin that config directory - Copy the entire default
content_severdirectory here - Overwrite the
browse/summary.htmlwith the version in this repository. - Edit the following line in
summary.htmlto make sure it contains the right URL for this tool instead of127.0.0.1
<a href="http://127.0.0.1:5000/{id}/" title="Update location">Location</a>- Restart the content server for the changes to take effect.