Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform reading server. Built with the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your reading collection with your friends and family.
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Published by majora2007 over 1 year ago
Well, I knew adding 73K lines of code in the last release would cause a few bumps in the release and it looks like I was right. A few users have pointed out some minor issues that escaped release testing and this hotfix closes those issues.
If anyone wants to help ensure these type of hotfixes aren't necessary, please join our Release Tester role in discord and help out in release testing. It's about a week of your time before release and drastically helps catch issues before they go out to our users.
Published by majora2007 over 1 year ago
Important
You and users MUST log out and log back in after updating for Kavita to function correctly!
v0.7 is finally here and boy is it big! When I started v0.7, I had planned for just a reader refresh and stats, but due to the 4 vacations I had during the development, so much more got added in. This is a massive update with many areas touched, tweaked, and added to, including a lot of bug fixes brought by our community. Let's start with the name of the release.
Stats:
Since the beginning of Kavita, I've always wanted rich metadata and cool stats to understand how much my users and I are reading, what's hot on the server, when is the most popular day for reading, etc. That's what the main feature of this release is about. Adding this cool contextual information into Kavita and presenting to not only the admin, but letting the users see their individual statistics. For example, I've learned since I started this project 2 years ago till this year, I've read 200K pages of manga. I hope you all enjoy the statistics and if you have any ideas, jump on our feature site and let me know.
Image Reader:
Last release I had already started a major cleanup of the image reader (or what I usually call the manga reader), but wasn't able to wrap it up and give it the polish needed before the release, so this release window, I polished until I thought I was looking at a mirror. My focus was not only on improvement on layout but also getting the double page reader down correct and that's what I did. I worked closely with a few members of the community (Thank you @hgourvest and @handy1928) to ensure the double reader works exactly as you'd expect and along the way, added a cool new effect to emulate a comic book page spine). I also added the ability to change pages with swipes, something users have requested. I still have some more items planned, but for now, the reader is solid.
Customization:
Everyone loves customization and so do I, which is why this release I made progress on an overarching set of features I want to add to Kavita. This customization added gives you the power to choose how content from libraries gets included or processed. With the new Library Settings, you can configure certain libraries to not show on any dashboards, in search results, or recommendations or a mix and match. In addition, you can allow or deny the auto creation of Collections (driven from SeriesGroup tag) and just to top it all off, add a custom image for the library icon, so it's easier to distinguish. I hope you enjoy the flexibility these enhancements bring and look forward to what I have in store in future releases.
Manga Manager:
I want to also give a big shout-out to @ThePromidius, the creator of our Tachiyomi plugin, who has built what I believe to be the best ComicInfo tagger around, Manga Manager. Over the past year, he has been putting a lot of time and effort into a rework of his tool and recently released the beta. It's insanely fast and has the potential to outshine all other tools out there. I encourage you to check it out. I have taken a role in his project to help him deliver on a combined vision.
Authentication:
Not so much as something new, more of an alert. All users must re-authenticate (log out then in again) for this release. I made some internal changes in the authentication tokens to allow for some optimizations in our API layer. Again, All users must re-authenticate after update.
Lastly, I want to shout out to some miscellaneous enhancements, like OPDS which received a touch up to include more metadata (authors, genres) in the feeds or to prepend reading order number in reading lists due to Chunky not respecting the spec. Kavita also now auto-creates Collections if SeriesGroup tag is filled out. If you're wondering what about reading lists, I got you covered (in another release). I worked up the code but didn't have time to polish it all out.
With all things said, I appreciate the community for coming out and helping with support and reporting issues and feature requests. Many feature requests were implemented in this release. Thank you to everyone that has reported issues. I encourage the community to speak up if they are facing issues so I can get them fixed.
Published by majora2007 almost 2 years ago
I took a one week vacation after the v0.6.0 release and it seemed there were a few issues that cropped up, so here is the hotfix. This hotfix fixes high utilization that a few users have reported. If you were one of these users, after this hotfix you should be clear to turn on folder watching again. If you're experiencing issues, please drop by support again.
In addition, there were a few security vulnerabilities exposed via Huntr. As usual, the details will be disclosed after a few days. Also a few parsing changes made release broke grouping for light novels that were not tagged correctly. This hack was added back in to help users not have to re-tag thousands of files (but I do encourage it).
Lastly a small but annoying bug where when reading in the manga reader, going backwards or moving to the next chapter could cause the screen to not update the image but the page changed. This is now squashed for good.
Published by majora2007 almost 2 years ago
This release has been an interesting time. Originally a small release with a big impact (auto updating) has turned into a release just about polishing and battle testing the scan loop from last release. Rewriting the scan loop last release was a huge effort and despite being diligent with testing with our nightly testers, bugs still slipped through. I wanted to take a step back and get Kavita sorted out before moving forward with new features, but I couldn't leave you with just fixes, so I made it action packed instead. With that, let's get into what's in this release.
Let's start with some big asks since the initial release of Kavita--the ability to send files directly to users devices. This is something Calibre has that avid book readers on Kindle need. Over the past few releases, I've been laying the ground work for this and with v0.6, we finally get to use it and from what the nightly users express, it's awesome. Any user in Kavita can setup devices with an email, this could be your Kindle email, your personal email, or anything. Give it a name and from any epub or pdf, you can send the file or files to your device. Currently this is limited to epub and pdf as there are no readers that support cbz, etc. However, if you have use cases, reach out. In order to use this, you must run your own KavitaEmail service.
Speaking of email, you know what's annoying? Having to have an email when you sign up for Kavita. Even though Kavita doesn't validate your email or require you to put in a real email, users have still complained about it. In this release, I updated the flows to better reflect this. Invite user will still ask for one but make it known it can be anything (although if it's not a real email an invite email will not send). When users sign up or an admin sets up the account, the email field is optional. On top of all this, Kavita now has a new Profile tab in User Settings which allows a central place to update and see their profile information and add/change it.
From emails to profiles, another big ask was Kid accounts. Many users have large libraries and want to restrict some profiles to certain levels of content. This is a tricky one as not all file formats are the same. PDFs and Epubs don't have an Age Rating field like CB* files, which expose it via the ComicInfo standard. Luckily, Kavita can store this information for you. With that, you can now setup Age Restrictions on accounts and grant those accounts the ability to maintain their own rating or not. Age Restrictions restricts all content that is higher than the rating set. If there are Unknowns (which is the default state), Kavita let's you set whether that is allowed for said profile or not. This restriction is applied at the highest level. So if you have one issue that is Mature while account is on Teen, the whole series will be purged from the user, including any promoted reading lists or collections.
That's a lot of heavy hitters, but I have more to talk about. This one is my favorite, Folder Watching. Folder Watching was introduced last release as an experimental feature and after much battle testing and reworking the code, I've cracked the code and gotten it to a really stable place. I personally have been running it for the last month without issue. This essentially brings your content into your server without having to wait for nightly scans. Do note, it is not designed for moving massive amounts of content over a long period of time into your library. It will still work, but you might get some partial series you have to manually cleanup.
Lastly, I want to talk more about the polish that this release is all about. Not only did the scan loop get major polish, from the release notes you'll see so did the parser, reader bugs (like double page layout now works consistently), and many quality of life enhancements.
A few shout outs on features as well:
To wrap up, I want to call out to some issues that cropped up in v0.5.6. As mentioned in the opening, the code was tested a ton but things slipped through. After you update, you need to pay attention to your logs. Your logs will indicate corrupted volumes or series that you need to manually cleanup from Kavita. This is an unfortunate reality, but luckily doesn't require data loss.
If you've still read to this point, props to you. If you've been enjoying Kavita, please consider donating or becoming a supporter. It makes a huge difference for me to continue pouring thousands of hours into the project (not just coding but support). Thank you again to my current supporters and those whom have donated.
Published by majora2007 about 2 years ago
For the past 3 months, I have been working tirelessly to rebuild our main scan loop, which is not only the most complicated part of Kavita but also the most critical. It translates files on your system into the series, volumes, and chapters you know in the UI. This goal of a new loop was so difficult, I quit 3 times, but finally made it through. The new loop is finally ready to share with you all, thanks to many of our nightly users helping test and provide feedback.
What is this new scan loop I speak of? The new scan loop is a new way (and a new set of requirements) to scan your disks and process files extremely efficiently. This changes Kavita to using a folder-based parsing mechanism rather than the previous mechanism where we would parse all files, group then perform DB operations in groups of 50. The reasoning for this drastic shift is that the old method failed to scale on users with massive libraries (we have one user with half a million files per stats) and would take an exceedingly long time for networked (rclone) users.
To dive in, we need to talk about some requirement changes. In order to utilize folder-based scanning, we have to remove the flexibility of users can put files anywhere they want and Kavita will group them for you. When I started, I chose this mechanism based on feedback from Plex and Jellyfin, but in reality most of our users have proper folder-based structures, so this new requirement change shouldn't affect many users.
Kavita expects all series to be in their own folder, so a library cannot have loose leaf files in it. You can still do /library root/manga/Publisher/Series A/, /library root/manga/Publisher/Series B/, just not /library root/my book.pdf. Kavita will now scan folder by folder an for each folder, group the files in and process them as a single series in a task (async). This task will do all DB operations and invoke Cover Gen and File Analysis (word counting) for just that series. This change is important because it will now process series-by-series and update your UI in that manner. Hence you should be able to more quickly see your series and use them completely than before on first scan. This however comes with a drawback due to increased I/O and trips to the DB, the library scan is slower (on first scan). For me, previously it took 30 mins to scan all files into the DB (without covers or word counts), on the new loop it takes 80 mins (but has covers and word counts). The main difference is on the old loop I had to wait at least 10 mins till the first chunk inserts, with the new loop, you don't have that issue. This also means the Chunk errors users sometimes receive should no longer be an issue and if there is an error, that series will tell you directly. You can find more information about the new Scan loop on the wiki.
With that said, this also allows some deep optimizations. Kavita will no longer do any I/O (except an attribute lookup on folders) if a folder hasn't changed since the last scan time. This single optimization means that my library scan can run in 5 seconds for my 660 series library, as it skips work on anything that hasn't changed. From the nightly testers, many users have seen drastic time reduction, esp our rclone users. This also allows for 2 enhancements, the ability to ignore certain files/folders (aka .kavitaignore) and the ability to hook into Kavita and say a folder has changed and let Kavita kick off a scan.
Next up is .kavitaignore, inspired from .plexignore and a feature request as well, users can now tell Kavita to ignore files and folders at any level of a scan. You can have at library root to have a global set of rules, like ignore cover.png, or you can have nested into your folders. You can have one for each folder and Kavita will intelligently combine the rules as it moves down the folder tree. This is another degree of freedom which allows you to not only filter, but speed up scans as well. This feature is experimental and still being tested and tweaked, but works in many cases. Give it a go and report back on issues faced or clever tricks that we can enhance our wiki with.
Lastly, we have folder watching. This new, experimental feature is really something cool. Why wait for nightly scans, when Kavita can pickup on changes and instantly run an appropriate scan? This new feature does just that. When a change is detected, a task is queued up and after 5 minutes executed. Any changes that related to that first task, will get disregarded. Please note, this is experimental and likely to not work if you download directly to your library. This feature will be fletched out further in later releases.
TLDR: There are new requirements for what Kavita expects from file layout. Read about it on the wiki. If you scan without conforming your layout, you may run into issues.
If you have been enjoying Kavita, please consider donating or backing me. Kavita is primarily built by just me in my spare time and each release is hundreds of hours of work.
Published by majora2007 about 2 years ago
This is another release where I forgot just how much I did. The intent of this release was performance and held tons of work that I had been wanting to tackle, but needed the dedicated time for. Originally I had planned to release this with the new scan loop, however due to security vulnerabilities and some bugs in the hotfix, I had to split the release in half. As mentioned, the focus is on performance and we are bringing a ton of nice performance improvements along with a new contributor, @TheIceCreamTroll, who not only opened a lot of bugs on Github, but also helped fix a few in the process. I look forward to more development work from them.
To start off this highlight, comes Downloads. Downloads have always been pretty reliable but when you're downloading tons of content for an upcoming trip, it can first get annoying when you leave the page, you might loose the download. Also that downloads kept prompting you for confirmation when the files are large (to hopefully not eat up your data cap). So this release, I reworked downloads significantly. Downloads are now handled at a global level, range processing is enabled (this means you can stop/start if your browser supports it), downloads are cached and thus streamed to your browser (less memory overhead), the event widget handling has been tweaked a lot to make it much more streamlined, and my favorite, if you start a download, go to another page then return, the download progress bar on the card will still show.
Another huge update for Kavita is moving to OnPush change detection, something that is more technical and more work for me, but has nice performance implications for the user. OnPush basically means that the code tells Angular when it's time to re-render, which means less work Angular does and hence more frames per second. Pairing this with the update to Angular 14, the UI should feel a lot snappier to you.
This next one is my favorite. I was shocked when I was on a non-admin account and realized, I didn't have a way to track what I wanted to read...normally, I would create a collection but then I realized, Kavita's collections are for admin's only (modeled after Plex originally). So I sought out to build a Want to Read list that is like a collection that tracks what you want to read. Right now, we have ability to filter against it and that's it. I plan to build it out in future updates; if you have any ideas, jump on the feature request site and submit them.
In addition to performance, I also focused on polishing up the double page reader from last release and fixed an annoying infinite redirection bug, usually seen on Firefox. If you have issues with the double page render, def stop by or create a Github issue to let me know.
Lastly, a few users have been having issues with the invite user flow. I've been hard at work trying to support these users, but have been unable to reproduce their issues. I made some changes in the Invite User flow to hopefully improve their lives, but behind the scenes I'm still engaged in support and planning enhancements around this Authentication system. Thank you for being patient. Early reports from users seem to have less issues post these changes, so give it another go if you fell into this bucket.
Lastly is a call to the community if anyone is interested in helping in Support in our discord or being a dedicated release tester. Kavita has gotten to the size where it is taxing to be building and testing all by myself. Currently release testing takes 3 days split between 3 people. I really need help from the community to help keep Kavita stable and let me focus on development rather than Support and Testing. If anyone is interested, please reach out to me in the discord.
With all that said, the next release will be even slower than this one. I have a lot of vacation planned for next 2 months and the left over work is extremely difficult, as it's the most complicated and critical part of Kavita. Thank you as always for being patient with releases and for those that have donated, I am extremely grateful. I've been buying my Kavita supplies (lots of coffee to get me through the scan loop).
Note: The security vulnerabilities may not be viewable till a few days after this release, to allow all platforms to upgrade their builds. Anything listed has been validated and fixed as of this release.
Published by majora2007 about 2 years ago
This is a hotfix to the hotfix, fixing image loading within Kavita.
Published by majora2007 about 2 years ago
This is a security hotfix, please update immediately! Several high severity issues were disclosed to the Kavita team this morning that require an immediate hotfix.
Thanks @vultza for disclosing these issues through Huntr.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
This is a hell of an update, so big I could barely figure out what features to put in the header. There were so many great additions that were not planned for this release, like the new PDF reader. Welcome to v0.5.4, this release is the part 2 of the UX and Reader refresh. This is another massive release, even I'm shocked when I was creating the release notes. This releases adds some big hitters and some requests from the community. Let's get started.
Coming up first is a niche feature for myself, but a few of our users will definitely like this, WebP storage support for bookmarks. If you use the bookmarking feature, your bookmark collection can get pretty big pretty fast. This new feature allows Kavita to covert images to WebP and save 40% space in the process. This is some foundational work as I want to expand this for all covers as well (WebP is missing Safari support).
Estimated Reading Time
This is a really cool feature as it helps you find what to read next based on how much time it might take to read it. Want something quick to read, your dashboard now shows series that it takes under 10 hours to read. If the series is image based, we use some estimates taken from our discord community to estimate a range of how long it takes to read. If it's a book, same deal, but we use word count rather than pages. Of course, estimated read time is now available for sorting as well. See some examples below:
List View
This is another one that is pretty cool and what looks like a simple feature, is in fact a lot of work under the hood. This new layout mode for the site really shines for book readers. Not only can you see the titles (if they are set), but also summary and other information, making it really easy to pick up a book to read. Plus, combined (in this screenshot) is the new Blur Unread summaries setting, which will blur summaries if you haven't read them, so you wont be spoiled when glancing over books in a series (like I was, creating this feature).
PDF Reader
I've always been annoyed with the PDF reader Kavita came with out of the box, but I personally don't have many PDF files, so it's not a big deal for me. I've been monitoring and searching for libraries that would provide a better experience and low and behold, I found one. It's not perfect, but it was easy to integrate and gives a much more natural experience when reading PDFs. I would love to hear feedback on this new reader from you, so drop by the discord or open a feature request with some ideas for it. This is our v1 implementation so some more reading focused features are not present. Feed me ideas so we can build out a more ideal solution.
Infinite Scrolling This is a big one. There is no more pages in the app (except a few places that haven't been attended to), everything is infinite scrolling with a jump bar to quickly jump around and virtualized DOM to keep it light on the browser. Due to the infinite scroll, the scroll bars are in different places than you might be used to. It might be jarring at first, but you'll quickly get used to it and love the speed at which the screen renders.
Double Page Layout
This is another big one. I had implemented most of it in Part 1, but had to pull from the release as it had some edge cases. @magujun took it upon themselves to drive it home and it's simply sweet. If you're a big comic fan or even want to read emulating a comic, this is the feature for you (on appropriately sized devices). We offer 2 new double page layout methods: Double and Double (manga). Double will render out the pages as Page 1 Page 2 | Page 3 Page 4. Double (manga) renders out the pages as Page 2 Page 1 | Page 4 Page 3 to help mimic the reading order of manga.
Detail Drawers
This is the last big feature to talk about and that is moving to drawers rather than modals for some screens. This new UX pattern is me playing with the idea and testing it out. So far, it seems to be much nicer experience on mobile.
With those big features out of the way, there are still plenty of great enhancements in here, like the ability to mark chapters as specials via ComicInfo.xml, parser support for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters, a redesigned cover upload, ability to enable swagger on your server (for those who develop scripts against our API), and even a redesigned Admin panel, to drive some future updates.
Next release will be another slow release, especially since I'm doing some deep refactors of the main scan loop. Next release is focused solely on performance and scan loop enhancements and will take quite some time. Thank you as always for being patient and supporting me in this project. Especially to those that provide support in discord and our donators.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
v0.5.3 is here and packed full of a collection of random features I wanted to build out for Kavita. I usually plan out the next few releases and stick to that schedule, adding in features that I want or users suggest randomly, but this time I wanted to sit down and take a release for myself to work on whatever I felt like, rather than what I had planned and it turned out to be really fun and some great additions came from it.
Let's start with what the discord community is abuzz about and that's the fated book reader refresh. Started last release but pushed due to complexity was a big refresh to the UX around the book reader and bringing one of our most up-voted feature request, calibre-like reading. Not only did we bring this reading mode to Kavita's reader, we also brought along new color themes for the reader for our OLED users, a font for Dyslexic users, and immersive mode, which hides the menuing system and lets you focus just on your book (goes great with column layout). It's been great iterating on the book reader since it was first built. I can't wait to see how it evolves and is polished further in later releases.
Next is my personal favorite and another coming from feature request, Series relations. Isn't it really annoying reading a series and not knowing what the next series is or what spin-offs exist? Well, now you can configure this into Kavita. From any series you can configure relationship links to other series, like sequels, prequels, spin off, side story, alternative version, etc. There are many links to choose from. You can see a little teaser of it below. Jump on our wiki to learn more about the feature.
Another killer addition is a big update to our search. You spoke and I heard you, you can now search for individual titles (book or manga/comics) and for individual files in addition to series, genres, people, tags, reading lists, libraries, collections, etc. This was tricky to implement and still retain the non-functional requirement of everything responding under 300ms. There should be no issues with you finding things in your server.
Wrapping it up is a few small but powerful ones. Likely you've seen it a few times in your logs, but the old constraint issue. I finally was able to track it down and squash it for good. It ended up being an index in the database that wasn't actually being used. Another one is the extra white space on the right side of the card grid system. Robbie was able to drive a beautiful solution and it works just as I envisioned. Lastly, On Deck was tweaked yet again to try to achieve a good balance of how I want it vs how I can actually code it and we have found a good compromise that works.
As usual, the release is packed with many things, so read through the changelog. To close off, I want to say thank you for all the support and suggestions to help shape Kavita. I have a lot of ideas that I want to see realized and really appreciate the inputs that have helped us build out Kavita.
Note: Kavita releases will slow down for a while as I have taken a new job. I am still committed to bringing my vision of Kavita to life, so don't worry about this project dying. I use Kavita daily.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
It has come to my attention that PDF rendering broke on 32-bit Pis due to a downstream dependency and a .net regression. The downstream library has put a workaround and we have confirmed it works in this. Sorry for the inconvenience. This will be the last hotfix.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
There were some unfortunate issues that slipped through release testing, so please update. The main focus for this hotfix is around SortName on series, which was getting cleared during a scan and not repopulated, thus breaking the sorting logic within Kavita.
In addition, some issues were found around Invite user, where unauthenticated browsers would not properly show the registration screen. These and a few more bugs reported have been fixed.
Please note, On Deck is still not functioning as expected from previous release and in this hotfix. It is planned to get a full treatment to align to my vision. Please make due with it as is.
Note 2: The hotfix is skipping patch .1 and .2 in order to better align with our nightly users.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
This was another huge release. I knew it was going to be big going in, I didn't expect that I'd had to split some of the features out into a separate release. This release is themed around UX enhancements and as you can see, we added custom theme support to Kavita (which was a lot of code changes behind the scenes). Admins can now either use one of our themes (eink is a new one) or build their own and encourage everyone to use it by setting it as the default theme for new accounts. Users can always change their theme based on their own needs.
We also added a side nav to Kavita. This was always my plan from day 1, but coding a side nav is no fun, so I had to wait a while till @therobbiedavis was here to do the heavy lifting. Thanks again Robbie! The side nav removes the need to have the libraries on the main page and based on my and the nightly users testing, is a huge experience upgrade. I'm excited to see what you think of it.
Another big feature is Metadata editing, something I've been looking to get to since we added metadata. Admins can now edit metadata in the UI and lock fields so that metadata updates from files do not override the custom edits done. This also allows to mark a series as 'On Hiatus', something that isn't possible with ComicInfo.xml. The edits stay in Kavita's DB. I will be assessing saving to the underlying file at a later time.
One more big feature that's not in the release title but should be is that the events widget that shows when a scan is in progress has been rewritten in a major effort to send more detailed information to the UI and ensures that only admins receive the messages when they should be protected by RBS. The widget will now show filenames when being scanned, series when they are updated or being generated for covers, and even errors that might occur, like you have an empty base folder from the library, which indicates a mounting problem. This is a really big enhancement, great to see, esp if you have a larger library or use networked storage.
Lastly, to wrap up. I finally got to re-tackle OPDS and help flatten some of the clicks users have to do and provide some better naming, which mimics the new series detail page rolled out last release (but also enhanced in this release). Kavita will now flatten based on some of the conditions of your series to reduce clicks. Search has been updated, download names as well. I hope the OPDS users enjoy it and let me know if you have ideas to improve it.
This release was a blast to work on and has many changes I can't touch on, please read through the changelog. I was lucky to be able to fix or improve a lot of different areas and features in Kavita thanks to the scope of changes the theming update required.
Some of my favorite smaller changes this release are:
Known Issue: Currently On Deck is not working as I want it, sometimes series will not get included on it, when they should be. I have plans to do a rewrite of this functionality for the next release. Please bear with me until then.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
There have been a significant amount of reports that users are struggling to receive the email link for email migration or they are unable to find in their logs (usually due to a logging level mismatch). We have altered the migration code to not require any email to be clicked and instead as long as you pass correct login credentials, email migration will successfully validate.
We will continue to look into the email functionality and smooth out existing flows. Thank you for being understanding.
Published by majora2007 over 2 years ago
Another jam packed update is here and it lays out some important foundational work for future updates. The focus of this update was account management and search overhaul. Both are functions that were built out very early in the project and haven't had much love in quite some time. The key accomplishments that I wanted was making account registration easier and more streamlined and overhaul search to work against the newly added metadata from last release.
First off, accounts now require emails to function. When you start v0.5.1 up, a one time migration will occur to have you confirm your email address. After that, you can now easily invite users to join your server and your user's can register their account from a unique link sent from your server. User's can now use forgot password as well to change their password, without you having to change and send to them manually. Emails will not be sent if your server is not accessible to the web, instead a link will be generated in your Logs under Email Link.
If you are concerned about your email, please note, that our email service (gmail) automatically delete emails that flow through them immediately and is only accessible by myself. If you are not satisfied with this, we offer a separate service for the email, so you can use your own SMTP server. You can find details here. If you don't want that, you can either access and invite users when your server is not accessible to the web (aka localhost/internal ip) or change the email service to a bad url, which will always fail and use the fallback.
Next up is search and I have to give a huge thanks to @therobbiedavis who really polished the UI up quite a bit. Our search now searches against the metadata fields, like people, genres, tags, it can search against collections and reading lists and is still blazing fast. The UX has been really polished and should work well on even the smallest devices.
As an added bonus to this release, we have refresh tokens which keep you authenticated without you having to re-login and Tachiyomi progress syncing is done and a Pull Request is open to have Tachiyomi support us.
This has been another great release. The next 2 releases are planned with a focus on UX and the readers. It will take some time, please be patient, but I think the results will speak for themselves.
Published by majora2007 almost 3 years ago
It's been some time since our last release, so much so that I almost forget what v0.4 was all about. v0.5 is finally here and is the largest release so far with 32 features, 31 changes, 36 bugfixes delivered. Thank you for waiting and without further ado, let's get into it.
Local metadata is here and Kavita will now respect your metadata over your filenames and in addition, pull in all that data. You can now slice and dice against that metadata from collections and library detail to explore your data. In addition, some fields from EPUBs are mapped into a respective ComicInfo field, so book collectors rejoice, you can now sort by author.
In addition, we now have a Tachiyomi Extension! Starting with v0.5, you'll be able to hook up Tachiyomi with Kavita and start consuming content. While the extension is feature complete, we are still working on integrating progress sync for Kavita into the Tachiyomi application. This will come at a later date. Thank you to @ThePromidius for building the app and the discord testers for beta testing for the past month.
This release is so jam packed, it's hard to pick out some other really cool features. Some of my favorites are PDF rendering has been multi-threaded and is way faster, bookmarks are stored differently and now allow for you to see image previews and also not worry that the underlying image is changed when you swap out the file. We updated to .NET 6, which comes with a ton of performance improvements and we've reworked all the cache logic to ensure that we only open your files when something new has happened.
I want to give a special shoutout to @ChristofferGreen for again coming in and helping our downstream libraries get PDF support on ARM 64-bit machines and @ThePromidius for working extremely hard to build out a Tachiyomi Extension for Kavita.
Lastly, the next release will not be this big. This release was so large due to the scope of changes to support local metadata and the fact that I took a holiday in December. I have replanned the work for the year on the Projects tab, so take a look there if you're curious what is coming. Our wiki will have updated pages in the coming week with how all the new features work. If anyone is interested in helping with updating the wiki, please drop me a pm in discord.
Note: Docker images older than v0.4.4 have been removed. Please try to keep up to date.
Published by majora2007 almost 3 years ago
The last hotfix broke account registration for new users. Sorry about that.
Published by majora2007 almost 3 years ago
It has come to my attention that v0.4.9 has a vulnerability where non-privileged users can create admin accounts for themselves. Please update to mitigate this issue.
Published by majora2007 almost 3 years ago
It's been 1 year since I started on this idea of building an alternative reader to Ubooquity with the goal of being the Plex of the reading world. I wouldn't be able to believe the amount of progress that I would make nor the direction shift which would happen thanks to my vocal and understanding community. Kavita has definitely come along ways and has a long ways to go. I have many ideas still to implement and look forward to growing it with your help.
This is the last release before the initial metadata support release. As mentioned last release, this is a split of the defects and changes to polish Kavita since the next release will take quite some time to implement. By total accident, this release has a huge focus on the readers adding new functionalities like fitting covers to device, a new bookmark effect, and of course, a complete rework for the webtoon reader making it a solid reading experience.
In addition, we had a few changes. We've added an indicator to the top right of the nav bar to show you when Kavita is performing tasks like scanning the system, refreshing cover images, running backups, etc. This will expand in functionality over time, but it should give you a good insight into what's happening with the system.
We've changed what we collect from you if you opt into Stat collection. We now only collect your anonymous install id, OS, kavita version, .NET version, if you're running docker, and the number or cores you have. All data previously collected that does not fall into this set of points has been deleted with this release.
Lastly In Progress section is now called On Deck. This behaves very similar, however when a series gets a new chapter/volume added to it and you have reading progress, it will jump to the beginning. This should help you quickly see when something new comes out on series you might have fully read.
Also, if you haven't seen, we have a new feature request site up. So if you've been wanting to request something, take a browse there and request or upvote others.
Lastly, I want to thank Palace-Designs Inc, whom has offered up hosting for our VMs for free, which helps us reduce costs. Thank you for all the resources and help in getting us migrated over.
Published by majora2007 almost 3 years ago
I started this release with the intention of it being small and targeted to rewrite search and make it more expansive, however half way through I realized, I really need the metadata code from the v0.5 release before I can implement my plan, so therefor, this release became a misc update aimed at fixing bugs found with the new influx of users.
This release is also smaller because I split the items going out. There was a large bug in the previous release where during scans, not all cover images would generate. I wanted to get that fix out, so I split most of the other stories (like webtoon polish) into another release (v0.4.9).
Breaking Change: Note that in this release, I have changed where all the config for the application lives. If you are not on docker, you don't need to do anything. Kavita will move your files to config/ directory on first run. If you are a docker user, all you need to do is change your mount point from:
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
to
docker run --name kavita -p 5000:5000 \
-v /your/manga/directory:/manga \
-v /kavita/data/directory:/kavita/config \
--restart unless-stopped \
-d kizaing/kavita:latest
aka data became config. If you forget this step, Kavita will notice and kill the server so you don't loose data.