this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

56957 readers
652 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Posting in case this helps anyone in the future. Not particularly difficult, I was just having this issue recently, and took some time today to work around it.

Lately, my Calibre-Web-Automated container will update eBook metadata, but will not update the book cover. I was never able to find an error, and using the CLI cover-enforce command didn't do anything either. I'm pretty sure that's all the GUI is doing, so not a surprise the CLI didn't work. Instead, it will insert a generic cover. For some lesser-known books, where it cannot find an appropriate cover, this procedure will also help.

First, ID the cover you want. If you have to manually scan the cover and get it into your container, you'll need to sort that out yourself. I was able to find decent enough covers on DDG image search. From there, drop into a shell in the CWA container, and run the following commands (Substitute variables below to meet your needs):

cd /calibre-library/${AUTHOR}/${BOOK_TITLE}  
curl "${IMAGE_URL}" > cover.jpg  
ebook-meta "${EBOOK_FILE}" --cover cover.jpg  

This assumes the image is a JPEG. Sub as necessary. Some that I found were WEBP files, and I wasn't sure they would work properly with ebook readers, so I just stuck with good old JPEG. Also, I figured the naming and placement of the cover file would scale fine for my whole library where needed. Adjust as you see fit.

ETA: Corrected a variable

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Amazing, thank you! I've had the same issue, otherwise I love CWA. Especially with Kobo integration.