Kavita

Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform OSS manga server. Built with a focus for manga, and the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your manga collection with your friends and family!

Goals:

• Serve up Manga/Webtoons/Comics (cbr, cbz, zip/rar, raw images) and Books (epub, mobi, azw, djvu, pdf)
• Provide Readers via web app that is responsive
• Provide a dark theme for web app
• Provide hooks into metadata providers to fetch Manga data
• Metadata should allow for collections, want to read integration from 3rd party services, genres.
• Ability to manage users, access, and ratings
• Ability to sync ratings and reviews to external services

How to Build

• Ensure you've cloned Kavita-webui. You should have Projects/Kavita and Projects/Kavita-webui
• In Kavita-webui, run ng serve. This will start the webserver on localhost:4200
• Run API project in Kavita, this will start the backend on localhost:5000

How to Deploy

• Run build.sh and pass the Runtime Identifier for your OS or just build.sh for all supported RIDs.

How to install

• Unzip the archive for your target OS
• Place in a directory that is writable. If on windows, do not place in Program Files
• Open appsettings.json and modify TokenKey to a random string ideally generated from https://passwordsgenerator.net/
• Run Kavita
• If you are updating, do not copy appsettings.json from the new version over. It will override your TokenKey and you will have to reauthenticate on your devices.

Docker

Running your Kavita server in docker is super easy! Barely an inconvenience. You can run it with this command:

docker run --name kavita -p 5000:5000 \
-v /your/manga/directory:/manga \
-v /kavita/data/directory:/kavita/data \
--restart unless-stopped \
-d kizaing/kavita:latest

You can also run it via the docker-compose file:

version: '3.9'
services:
    kavita:
        image: kizaing/kavita:latest
        volumes:
            - ./manga:/manga
            - ./data:/kavita/data
        ports:
            - "5000:5000"
        restart: unless-stopped

Note: Kavita is under heavy development and is being updated all the time, so the tag for current builds is :nightly. The :latest tag will be the latest stable release. There is also the :alpine tag if you want a smaller image, but it is only available for x64 systems.

Want to help?

I am looking for developers with a passion for building the next Plex for Manga, Comics, and Ebooks. I need developers with C#/ASP.NET, Angular 11 or CSS experience. Reach out to me on Discord.

Buy me a beer

I've gone through many beers building Kavita and expect to go through many more. If you want to throw me a few bucks you can here. Money will go towards beer or hosting for the upcoming Metadata release.