What is Araru?
Araru organizes and serves a digital collection on infrastructure controlled by its owner. A central Server provides one authoritative home for storage, credentials, metadata, and reading state.
Why self-hosted?
Section titled “Why self-hosted?”Self-hosting keeps files and behavioral data under your policies. Operators must still maintain HTTPS, strong credentials, backups, updates, and restricted network access.
Araru is software, not a hosted content service. The Araru project does not receive, store, provide, or distribute the files in a user’s library. The installation operator supplies legitimately acquired files and makes them available only through infrastructure and networks they control. See Content ownership and responsibility.
Core concepts
Section titled “Core concepts”- User: an authenticated identity with a role and credentials.
- Profile: a reading context isolating preferences, favorites, and progress.
- Library: the logical catalog and authorization boundary.
- Source: a configured storage location owned by one Library.
- Work: the canonical item; File: a specific format representation.
- Storage provider: the service that stores or streams a Source, such as local filesystem, Google Drive, or Cloudflare R2.
- Metadata provider: filename and embedded data, then ISBN and optional external sources.
- Reader engine: a format-specific client engine with shared navigation and progress.
- Background job: durable indexing, reconciliation, metadata, or cover work.
Clients never connect directly to PostgreSQL, Redis, filesystem storage, Drive, or secrets.