I’ve been trying out Kavita as an ebook software, and I really like it so far, with one exception. Accounts are all local to the app, and there is no ability handle user accounts through their site, similar to how Plex does it. This means that every time I screw up and have to set up again over the years, my users will have to get new invites and make new accounts. When I mess up Plex and have to reinstall, I can just add new permissions for the users already linked to my account, which makes it easy to transition everyone to a new server with minimal impact to my viewers.
Before I fully commit to Kavita, is there any program out there for ebooks that has accounts managed through a central server rather than my local one?
Jellyfin has a (plugin) opds server for ebooks that use the same accounts as the rest of jellyfin. I use calibre to deal with organization/metadata.
If you have a bunch of plex users, switching to jellyfin might be a bridge too far.
Are jellyfin accounts handled through their own account system like Plex?
No. Jellyfin accounts are local. So you need to set them up on the server. No external auth system
Looks like there is an LDAP auth plugin: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-plugin-ldapauth
If you ran such a beast.
How about using LDAP? It’s a bit complicated to learn but it’s easy to integrate it in a bunch of applications and it allows you to manage user accounts and permissions in one central place.
Maybe try LLDAP which is a modern implementation (haven’t used it myself) which is designed to be simplified and I assume more welcoming to newcomers.
Thanks, I will have to do some googling about that today.
I use Calibre-Web and external auth. The auth headers are added by Authelia + Nginx which sit in front of it.
Not exactly turn-key, but since I was already using Authelia, it was simple enough to switch from local accounts to external.
Any good resources you can point me to for that?
I use the version packaged by linuxserver.io:
https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-calibre-web/
Unfortunately, that’s about as good of docs as I’ve been able to find for it.
To configure external auth, go to its web interface at
/admin/configand then expand “Feature Configuration”There’s a checkbox for “Enable reverse proxy authentication” and below that a field to specify the header name that will contain the email address of the authenticated user. In my case, it’s REMOTE_EMAIL.
That header will vary depending on what you have setup for authentication, but it needs to provide an email address that determines the user.
My version is a little old, but from skimming the current docs, it may support OAUTH now.
Jellyfin does books but its a little wonky right now from.my experience
I recommend going with regular backups and maybe something like docker. Then you just have to restore the config volumes and all the accounts should still be there.
