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I Bought a New Domain

·303 words·2 mins
Table of Contents

Introduction
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So, I ended up buying a new domain—mostly because it was super cheap. Figured I might as well use it for a year.

I also signed up for AWS Free Tier, which gives me 750 hours of EC2 usage per month for a whole year. Now that I’ve got both a domain and a VPS, I guess it’s time to become death, destroyer of idle servers.

I’ve set up a public Calibre server at calibre.saqibmir.site and I also built a webpage with the help of AI that shows real-time updates and stats from Last.fm and Spotify—check it out here. It’s pretty cool imo. It uses the Last.fm API under the hood.

I wanted to write this blog to show how easy it is to set up your own Calibre server. It doesn’t take much—just a domain, a VPS, and a bit of time. Hopefully, this will help someone else realize how simple (and fun) self-hosting can be using pre-existing “self-hostable” services.

Set up your own calibre service
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Prerequisites
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  • An A record with name calibre pointing to your server like this:

Procedure
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  • Install calibre
apt install -y calibre
  • Prepare directories
mkdir -p /opt/calibre/my_library
  • Upload a book (manually for the sake of simplicity)
cd /opt/calibre
calibredb add /path/to/book.epub --with-library my_library
  • Create a service Create a new file /etc/systemd/system/calibre-server.service
[Unit]
Description=Calibre library server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
Group=root
ExecStart=/usr/bin/calibre-server --enable-local-write /opt/calibre/your_library --listen-on 127.0.0.1

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  • Enable and start the service
systemctl enable --now calibre-server
  • Create a reverse proxy with nginx First create a file /etc/nginx/sites-available/calibre
server {
    listen 80;
    client_max_body_size 64M; # to upload large books
    server_name calibre.<yourdomain> ;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }

Then enable the site

ls -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/nginx /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
  • Issue a let’s encrypt certificate
certbot --nginx

Reload nginx

nginx -s reload

Done! Now just go to calibre.