[chaley]

Originally Posted by sigizmund

Hey folks,

I am trying to understand if I can write a Python code running not as a plugin which will be manipulating Calibre without UI. Example: add book to the specified Calibre library. Obviously starting calibredb command is one option, but I'm interested if I can just `import` some libraries and manipulate database in-process. In pseudocode:

import calibre.database as db

database = db.OpenDb('/path/to/library')
database.AddBook('/path/to/book.epub')
database.Close()

Thanks!

Yes, you can do what you want. Use the calibre-debug command, and in particular calibre-debug -e. The entire calibre api is available.

This example prints all the tags in a library, sorted.

from calibre.utils.icu import sort_key
def init_cache(library_path):
	from calibre.db.backend import DB
	from calibre.db.cache import Cache
	backend = DB(library_path)
	cache = Cache(backend)
	cache.init()
	return cache

cache = init_cache(library_path = sys.argv[1])
all_tags = sorted(list(cache.all_field_names('tags')), key=sort_key)
for t in all_tags:
	print(t)

You execute it with

calibre-debug -e all_tags.py PATH-TO-LIBRARY