Setting up a headless Calibre server

My wife and I like to read books on the go, and we use an Android app called Aldiko (it's great) to read epubs. I have loads of epubs on my computer, and I have traditionally used Calibre's server feature to share them with our phones. In the past, I've kind of clobbered together things on an Ubuntu box that also served as my main desktop computer. That worked well in the past, but I've recently set up a headless Debian Squeeze server, and I decided to migrate my Calibre server there. I had some setbacks, and thought it would be worth it to document the process here, and how I got things to work successfully.

My server runs headless, and that's the first problem with Calibre. The version of it in the Debian Squeeze repositories doesn't have a standalone server mode that is configurable without using the graphical UI. I can't have that, so I decided to get newer binaries installed. Ordinarily, I wouldn't recommend this, especially on a system like Debian whose community prides itself on the stability of their software packages, but this is a functional necessity, so I'll take it. This command, ripped straight from the official Calibre website, worked for me:

sudo python -c "import sys; py3 = sys.version_info[0] > 2; u = __import__('urllib.request' if py3 else 'urllib', fromlist=1); exec(u.urlopen('http://status.calibre-ebook.com/linux_installer').read()); main()"

When prompted, I told it to install to ''/opt/calibre'' so it wouldn't conflict with any system libs or binaries.

That means that ''/opt/calibre/calibre-server'' is the standalone daemon for serving e-books.

I wanted to servicize it, so I wrote this init script and placed it at ''/etc/init.d/calibre-server'':

#!/bin/bash

CALIBRE_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/shared/Calibre Library"
PIDFILE=/tmp/calibre-server.pid
USER=calibre
PORT=8081

start() {
        echo "Starting Calibre server..."
        su -c "calibre-server --with-library=\"$CALIBRE_LIBRARY_PATH\" -p $PORT --pidfile=$PIDFILE --daemonize" & 
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
                echo "Could not start calibre-server."
        fi
}

stop() {
        echo "Stopping Calibre server..."
        if [ -e $PIDFILE ]; then
                read PID < $PIDFILE
                ps aux | grep "$PID" | grep 'calibre-server' > /dev/null
                RUNNING=$?
                if [ $RUNNING -eq 0 ]; then
                        kill $PID
                        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
                                rm $PIDFILE
                        fi
                else
                        echo "Could not find a calibre-server process with PID $PID."
                fi
        else
                echo "Could not find pidfile: $PIDFILE"
        fi
}

restart() {
        stop
        start
}

status() {
        if [ -e $PIDFILE ]; then
                read PID < $PIDFILE
                echo "calibre-server is running with PID $PID."
        else
                echo "calibre-server is not running."
        fi
}

unknown() {
        echo "Unrecognized command: $1"
        echo "Try one of the following: (start|stop|restart|status)"
}

case $1 in
        start ) 
                start
                ;;
        stop )
                stop
                ;;
        restart )
                restart
                ;;
        status )
                status
                ;;
        * )
                unknown
                ;;
esac

You can change the variables at the top to run the server differently. Once this is given execute permissions, you can start the server with:

/etc/init.d/calibre-server start

And stopped with

/etc/init.d/calibre-server stop

It looks like the ''service'' command works, too:

service calibre-server start

I know there are some other problems I need to work out (how to import new books, for example), but this seems like a good start. Anyone have any tweaks or additions to note?