Citadel

Manage your ebook library with Citadel. Backwards compatible with Calibre.

Citadel.overview.mp4

Citadel is very early software, and as such is full of bugs and lacking features.

Project goals

Backwards compatible with Calibre: Calibre must be able to read any library that Citadel has edited.
Good UX: Citadel must be easy to use and look good.
Performant: Citadel must feel much faster than Calibre, and never slower.

Non-goals

Ebook reader: Citadel is not an ebook reader. There are many other tools that do a much better job than we could do.
...or editor: If you're editing ebook content (not metadata like titles), Citadel will not be a replacement for you.
100% feature parity: Primarily around Plugins, but there are some advanced features of Calibre we'll likely never build.

Downloading

Warning

Citadel is very early in development. It will crash. A lot. It may corrupt your ebook library.

Back up your Calibre library regularly if you use Citadel on it.

Citadel builds are available from GitHub actions. There is no guarantee these builds work.

Developing

As a prerequisite, you'll need to install Bun, Node¹, and Rust.

Then, you can install the packages.

bun install

and start up the app like so:

bun run dev
# or just bun dev

App preview without backend

You can run just the frontend with this command, although you WILL see errors as the Rust backend will be missing but is assumed to exist:

bun dev:app

To run the backend in server mode for development, run

bun dev -- -- -- -- --server --calibre-library=/path/to/calibre/library

Yes, that is 4 pairs of --s. This is because Bun will pass the first pair to another bun run command, the second will go to tauri dev, the third will go to vite dev, and finally the last set will go to Cargo when running the backend. It's a mess!

To run the backend in server mode for production, run

/Applications/Citadel.app/Contents/MacOS/Citadel --server --calibre-library=/path/to/calibre/library

Building

To create a production version of Citadel, you'll need the development prereqs. Then:

bun install
bun run build

Additional Credit

Huge thanks to Kemie Guaida, who created an excellent Calibre redesign Figma prototype. Thank you, Kemie!

https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel/issues/9 ↩

krisburke/citadel