Introduction

Grimmory is a self hosted book server that allows you to organize, access and self-host your digital library.

History

Grimmory is an independent community fork of Booklore. It was an open-source project licensed under the AGPLv3 license but was shut down by the developer. Grimmory exists as the most actively developed fork of Booklore.

See the project here: Website | GitHub

Self Hosting Grimmory

You can self host Grimmory on either your own hardware or you can use a VPS provider like DigitalOcean and host it in the cloud. In this blog, I’ll be hosting my instance on DigitalOcean.

Creating the directory structure

First up, we create the directory structure for the application.

mkdir -p ~/services/grimmory/
sudo mkdir -p /opt/grimmory/{mariadb/config,bookdrop,data,books}
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /opt/grimmory

We do a chown with the user id and group id 1000 to ensure no permission issues occur as the grimmory container itself will be running with user and group id 1000. If you wish to run it as another user, substitute the user id with the appropriate user id in the .env file (here)[hyprlink]

The following defines which folders will be used for what purpose.

Setting up environment variables

cd ~/services/grimmory

Create a .env file with the following variables.

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# Grimmory Application Settings
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APP_USER_ID=1000
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APP_GROUP_ID=1000
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TZ=Etc/UTC
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BOOKLORE_PORT=6060
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# Database Connection (Grimmory)
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DATABASE_URL=jdbc:mariadb://mariadb:3306/grimmory
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DB_USER=grimmory
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DB_PASSWORD=password
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# MariaDB Container Settings
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DB_USER_ID=1000
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DB_GROUP_ID=1000
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MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=rootpassword
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MYSQL_DATABASE=grimmory

Set TZ to your timezone. Change the DB_PASSWORD and MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD. You can generate them using openssl.

openssl rand -hex 32

DB_PASSWORD and MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD should ideally be different.

You can also download the file here.

Creating the compose file

Now for the compose file, we require two containers. The grimmory application itself and mariadb.

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services:
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  grimmory:
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    image: grimmory/grimmory:latest
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    container_name: grimmory
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    environment:
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      - USER_ID=${APP_USER_ID}
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      - GROUP_ID=${APP_GROUP_ID}
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      - TZ=${TZ}
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      - DATABASE_URL=${DATABASE_URL}
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      - DATABASE_USERNAME=${DB_USER}
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      - DATABASE_PASSWORD=${DB_PASSWORD}
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      - BOOKLORE_PORT=${BOOKLORE_PORT}
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    depends_on:
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      mariadb:
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        condition: service_healthy
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    ports:
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      - "${BOOKLORE_PORT}:${BOOKLORE_PORT}"
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    volumes:
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      - /opt/grimmory/data:/app/data
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      - /opt/grimmory/books/:/books
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      - /opt/grimmory/bookdrop:/bookdrop
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    restart: unless-stopped
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  mariadb:
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    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mariadb:11.4.5
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    container_name: mariadb
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    environment:
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      - PUID=${DB_USER_ID}
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      - PGID=${DB_GROUP_ID}
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      - TZ=${TZ}
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      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD}
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      - MYSQL_DATABASE=${MYSQL_DATABASE}
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      - MYSQL_USER=${DB_USER}
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      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=${DB_PASSWORD}
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    volumes:
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      - /opt/grimmory/mariadb/config:/config
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    restart: unless-stopped
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    healthcheck:
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      test: ["CMD", "mariadb-admin", "ping", "-h", "localhost"]
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      interval: 5s
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      timeout: 5s
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      retries: 10

You may use the GHCR mirror if you cannot or do not want to use Docker Hub.

ghcr.io/grimmory-tools/grimmory:latest

It’s recommended to pin the container to a tagged version when running in production. Check releases to find the tags.

You can also find the file here.

Starting the container

You’re now ready to run the application. Pull the container image and start it with:

docker compose up -d

Grimmory should now be available at localhost:6060

http://localhost:6060

I recommend looking at Grimmory’s official documentation here to continue with the process of setting up the application.

Thanks for reading. Goodbye.