Calibre auto deployment with salt

[alan-cugler]

Good Afternoon (from Texas),
The company I work for has been working to finish a set of open-salt states for deploying and managing Calibre on a Linux headless server. Technically they are already done and work, but I am adding in additional logic checks and such to ensure consistent and stable deployment.

Is there someone to talk to about presenting this "easy deploy" Calibre server code? I'm hoping people think its useful and we can put it on the Calibre website either next to the "getting started" stuff or the download link for the latest version so more people could get this up and running quickly for their personal libraries.

Thank you for your time,
Alan J Cugler,
Terminal Labs Solutions Architect

[kovidgoyal]

You are welcome to talk to me. Although I am not sure what deploy and manage mean in this context. Isnt it just stop the calibre content server, run the installer and restart the server?

[alan-cugler]

To some degree that's the major steps. Some of the salt provisioning goals include:
- Could spin up cloud virtual machine servers (Linux)
- Set Calibre to be managed by systemd and under a deescalated "calibre" system user
- Configure authentication settings
- Stand up an Nginx server to handle traffic
- Set DNS records for a domain name
- Use LetsEncrypt to instantiate SSL certs with automated renewal
- Use Samba to make ebook syncing and metadata management possible from ones desktop

A couple of these goals are pretty wide and experimental, but it would ensure people could overcome issues like:
- not having hardware available
- reach their server from across the internet but having bad internet at home
- simplifying setting up professional security

If someone has already made this available I would love to look, but I have been all over the documentation and forums, and not seen such a comprehensive service initialization.

[kovidgoyal]

I dont know of anyone that's automated all those things publicly at least.

[alan-cugler]

I guess I am not surprised about a lack of public publishing of such work. It can be both time and financially expensive to develop and then release comprehensive documentation.

Terminal Labs does do this kind of work for the private and public markets regularly. We have a preference towards python and open-source tooling; so we are using salt to accomplish the tasks listed earlier. We hope to host these states along with a couple guides to assist people in using them.

If Calibre is interested in partnering with us towards this goal I would like to setup a meeting and show what we have already developed. Getting some feedback before to much time has been committed in case an assumption we made about Calibre is wrong.

Let me know if you are up for it!
Alan J Cugler,
Terminal Labs Solutions Architect

[kovidgoyal]

You are most welcome to send a PR with your documentation, it can be added to the existing documentation in server.rst as an example.

[alan-cugler]

The code and guide will need updating and expansion over time, so I am going to have that hosted on Terminal Labs website so that it will also be maintained.

I would like to put a link and description of Terminal Labs and what the guide is offering on Calibre website. That is what I was pitching to my leadership for making the Calibre states for people. We maintain something that helps a python open-source project and we get to throw our name out there in the community.

Alan J Cugler,
Terminal Labs Solutions Architect

[kovidgoyal]

Sure send a PR with a link to your writeup in server.rst

[alan-cugler]

Awesome! Alright, look for that in the next couple weeks! Thanks for hearing me out.