Introduction

Pathagar is a simple book server for schools where there is little or no internet.

For more information, see this presentation by Prof. Sameer Verma.

For some of the history of the project, read this blogpost at OLPC-SF

Pathagar2 is a fork to keep simplicity of original project and keeping it alive.

Join the chat at https://gitter.im/murlock/Lobby

Report issues at https://github.com/murlock/pathagar/issues

OPDS

It uses the OPDS spec:

http://opds-spec.org

It was tested successfully with Aldiko Book Reader on Android.

Adding Contents

Books can be added via the admin interface, as well as via the command line, in batch (using CSV files, JSON files or a directory with EPUB files), through the command:

python manage.py addbooks

        OR

python manage.py addepub

Pathagar runs on the python web app framework Django. It is known to work in Django 1.11

Loading content

Once installed, Pathagar contains no books. You can upload individual books through the UI or you can bulk load them by following the instructions below.

From Internet Archive

You can download book files from Internet Archive. First you need to create a user and a bookmarks list. Once created, you'll fetch the book files on your bookmarks list with the fetch_ia_item command.

python manage.py fetch_ia_item --username=<your-username> --out=books.json

This can take a while depending on your internet connection and how many books you have on your bookmarks list. You might want to go grab a coffee and take a stretch break.

Once complete, you'll have a books.json file which you can use with the addbooks command.

python manage.py addbooks --json books.json

Learn more about the addbooks command below.

addbooks command

If you have your books already with metadata described in a file, use the addbooks command to import them into Pathagar.

CSV format

To add books from a CSV file:

python manage.py addbooks books.csv

The format of the CSV file is like:

"Path to ebook file","Title","Author","Description"

If you need to add more fields, please use the JSON file.

JSON format

To add books from a JSON file:

python manage.py addbooks --json books.json

The format of the JSON file is like::

[
  {
    "book_path": "Path to ebook file",
    "cover_path": "Path to cover image",
    "a_title": "Title",
    "a_author": "Author",
    "a_status": "Published",
    "a_summary": "Description",
    "tags": "set, of, tags"
  },
  ...
]

You can add more fields. Please refer to the Book model.

Dependencies

Python 2.7 or Python 3.5
Django
django-taggit
django-sendfile

Quickstart

Install mysql (optional)

In Fedora

sudo yum install -y mysql mysql-devel

Install requirements

python3 -m venv venv_pathagar . ./venv_pathagar/bin/activate pip install -r requirements.pip
In the Pathagar folder, copy local_settings.example.py to local_settings.py and edit it to suite your needs and environment.
In the Pathagar folder, run

python manage.py migrate python manage.py createsuperuser

You will be asked to create an admin user during this stage.
To run the server, run

python manage.py runserver

This starts a server listening on localhost, port 8000

If the port 8000 is in use, can change the port (by example to 8081) running

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8081
With your browser, access http://localhost:8000 and see if the index page comes up. If it comes up, click on "Add books" in the footer to start adding books. You will be asked for a username/password. This is the admin username/password you supplied while running createsuperuser.

NOTE: You can also mass add books via the command line through CSV files or by simply pointing to a directory with a set of EPUB files.
To run the server in a production environment, look at Django deployment docs at : https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/howto/deployment/

Contributing

Bugfix or enhancement are welcome.

Please drop me a message or issue for big feature to avoid duplicate efforts.

The unittest must be working for Python 2.7 and Python 3.5.

To run selenium tests, the tool (geckodriver)[https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases] must be downloaded and put somewhere in PATH.