The Portable Calibre installation is targetted at providing a completely bootable environment. However if all you want is to carry around your Calibre Binaries and Calibre library on a thumb drive and all the machines you intend to use are running the same OS then this is comparitively easy.
The Windows batch file I use for this purpose is attached - hopefully it is relatively self-explanatory. If on another OS then the syntax will need adapting to that OS.
This batch file shows all the tricks that are used to control the placements of files used by Calibre. I use it primarily to run Calibre with good performance of a NAS - but it also works fine off a USB drive. I also have it set up to allow Calibre to be run from source (if present). You can comment out those lines if you want, but their presence does no damage and it is a useful reminder on how to do that.
The batch file makes no assumptions about Calibre being on the host machines search path, or anything in the host machines registry. This makes it very appropriate for using in environments where one cannot install software on the host. The only requirement that the batch file has on the host is that appropriate versions of system software (such as MSVC libraries) are installed.
To update to a new Calibre release all you have to do is install (or copy) the new release into the calibre binaries folder on the USB stick. Do not forget if you are running from source you also need to update the source as if source is present it over-rides the binaries.
Hope this helps?
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