I’m a long time comic book fan and with a new Synology and iPad Pro I thought it is the right time to set up my own comic book server.

There are many different options for having your own ebook/comic book server in your homelab but my configuration will be as follows:

• Server hardware: Synology DS1821+
• Server software: Komga (as a Docker container)
• Client software: Panels

Getting Started

In the previous post, you learned the basics of running a Docker container on Synology NAS. In this article, we will take it a bit further and will create a container “project” in the Container Manager package (which corresponds to Docker Compose YAML file) and will use persistent data.

To get going, first log in to your Synology DSM and open the Container Manager.

Switch to Project tab and click the Create button.

In Project name field, enter komga

In Path section, click Set Path button and create new folder under docker shared folder named komga or whatever you like to indicate that’s it’s your comic book server.

In the Source section, select Create docker-compose.yaml.

In the textarea, paste the following code:

---
version: '3.3'
services:
  komga:
    image: gotson/komga
    container_name: komga
    volumes:
      - type: bind
        source: ./config
        target: /config
      - type: bind
        source: ./data
        target: /data
    ports:
      - 25600:25600
    restart: unless-stopped

As you can see the paths are placeholders. First, open a File Station instance on the Synology DSM and create 2 folders under /docker/komga called config and data.

Alternatively, you can choose another path on your Synology and use that path. If you do that you will need to update the paths in your YAML configuration as well. The above snippet assumes compose.yaml will be stored under /docker/komga and the config and data folders will be subfolders on the same level.

Your configuration should look like this:

Docker project setup

Click Next.

In Web portal settings, enable port and update if you want to serve your content on a different port.

If you get a prompt saying you have to install Webstation, click Install.

Once you’ve created your project and it’s running you should see the container with a green status:

Komga container in running status

Now you can visit your NAS local IP at port 25600 and you should see the default Komga login page:

Komga login page

As the message explains, you now need to create your admin user.

Enter an email address and password to create your account and click Create User Account.

You should now see the dashboard:

Komga dashboard

Before you create your first library, createa folder called at /data/free. If you mapped your data folder to somewhere else, use that path.

Now create your first library called Free. This will be used to test your setup and will contain a free comic book that you’ll download. As Root Folder, enter /data/free.

Click Next in the following sections and create the library.

Now you need to add some comic books to your library. There are lots of free comics available on the Internet. For this demo, go to archive.org and search free comic book cbz

You can see below there are lots of options to download:

Free comics

Now upload the downloaded file to your synology and click Scan library files (which is the first item on the context menu next to the library name)

You should now be able to see your new comic book on your server:

Free comic book added to the library

Client Setup

You can click on your comic book on the web browser and read it that way. If that’s good enough for you, then you’re done. If you want more complicated readers, I recommend using Panels on iOS devices. It has free and paid options. I bough a lifetime subscription and quite happy with that.

To connect to your own Komga server from Panels, click menu and choose Connect Service. In the dialog, select OPDS.

In OPDS Configuraiton, add an Alias such as Komga on Synology

Enter the IP address, port, username and password and click Apply.

On the Import Services section you should see the newly added OPDS server. Click on that item.

Click Latest books and you should see your comic book listed.

Tap on the book and click Import

Choose a local library on your Panels app and click Add to Library. Once downloaded, click On My iPad and you should see the comicbook. This way now you can quickly browse your comic book library on your own server and read as you please.

## Summary In this article, you learned how to install a Komga server on a Synology NAS. You configured it and uploaded your first comic book. Then you configured the client iOS app and downloaded the comic which is now ready for your consumption. Enojy!

Resources

• Komga Official Website
• Panels on App Store
• Synology DS1821+

As a big fan of Raspberry Pis, I have been running multiple Pis with multiple Docker containers. They can serve a lot of different purposes for your home lab. The problem is you have to make sure you backup your data frequently. You can use a NAS as your backup system but what’s even better is to utilize the compute power of your Synology NAS and run your Docker containers directly on the NAS. This way you can have built-in redundancy assuming you did set up redundancy with your NAS which is generally the common goal.

Getting Started

To run Docker containers on your Synology NAS, you need to install a package called Container Manager. You can check if your Synology is compatabile with this package on his page: Container Manager compatability

In this tutorial, I’ll be using a Synology DS1821+ model.

Open Package Center, and search for “container”.

Search results for container in the package center

Click Install on Container Manager package or you can click on somewhere else on the box to read the details of the package. Then you can click Install on that page too.

Container manager package details

Once installed, click Open to see the details

Container manager installed

You can now that the Container Manager is ready to use:

Container manager ready to use

## Running Containers To run a container off of a Docker image, first you need to pull the image from a Docker registry. By default, the container manager uses DockerHub as its Docker registry but you can sutomize it by clicking Registry –> Settings.

Docker registry settings

Here you can add other registries from other providers.

To test your setup, click on nginx package and click Download.

nginx on container manager

When asked to choose a tag, accept the default which is “latest” and click Download again.

Choose tag dialog

Once the image is downloaded, you can see it in the Image section

Image details

Click Run button. You should a settings dialog window. Here you can customize the resouce allocation of your container.

General settings while running a container

Click Next and you will be presented with the Advanced Settings such as port mapping, environment variables etc.

Advanced settings while running a container

Here enter a local port to be able to access your web server. In this example, I will use port 6500 to access the nginx on this container.

Click Next again, review the Summary and click Done.

Container settings summary

You can now view your container by switching to the container tab.

You view your new Nginx server running on your Synology NAS at port 6500, simply go to your NAS address followed by :6500 to indicate the port and you should see it in action:

nginx running on port-6500

Summary

In this beginners tutorial, you learned how to install the Container Manager package on your Synology NAS and ran your first container. In the upcoming articles, we will cover running Docker containers in more depth with more real-life examples.

Resources

• Container Manager compatability

Package management is quite easy with .NET as we have NuGet as the default package manager. We have direct access to hundreds of thousands of packages freely hosted at NuGet.org.

Recently, a free package called FluentAssetions, which is a very popular NuGet package, became a paid product. So if you upgrade from the free version 7 to paid version 8 you have to pay for the package.

Normally when you start using a package it’s easy to upgrade. NuGet automatically upgrades everything to the latest version. This made me think, if you are using FluentAssertions, it may cause some issues if you have developers who aren’t aware of the licensing issue. They may without realizing license difference, automatically upgrade to a paid version.

To avoid this issue, you can control the version of your packages. Let’s see how it works in a demo application. Open a terminal and choose a directory that you want to work in.

Then run the following commands:

mkdir NuGetVersioningDemo
cd NuGetVersioningDemo
dotnet new console

Now you should have a new Console Application created in your directory. Open it with your IDE.

Add Newtonsoft.Json package to work with package versions by running the following command:

dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json

At this point, your project should look like this (I’m using JetBrains Rider in this example but it the project structure and the NuGet package should look similar if you’re using a different IDE):

Screenshot of the project setup with a NuGet package added

If you don’t specify the version, NuGet automatically fetches the latest version which in this case is 13.0.3. To get a specific version you can use the same dotnet command and provide the version as shown in the example below:

dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json --version 12.0.1

So for the sake of demonstrating version control, let’s assume Newtonsoft.Json became a paid product as of version 13 and you want to upgrade to all versions up to v13. I didn’t use actual FluentAssertions in this example because I didn’t want anyone to make a mistake and accidentally upgrade to the paid version.

The way to manage the versions is using square brackets and parentheses.

For example, the following command installs the latest package up until v13

dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json --version "[*,13)"

This way you can lock in the maximum version you want to install for a specific version.

Resources

• FluentAssertions Official Website
• FluentAssertions Paid License Details
• NuGet Package Versioning