PizzaReader

About PizzaReader

A manga and comic reader written in Laravel and Vue.
It is used from 2020 by many italian scanlation teams, like lupiteam.net, phoenixscans.com and gtothegreatsite.net, that is the reason why it is called PizzaReader.
It supports Tachiyomi, a manga reader Android application and I created there a multisrc class to add your reader there too.
The admin panel is inspired by the old famous FoOlSlide2 because I started to develop this reader for personal use, but other italian teams contacted me and asked to install it on their websites.
I made this reader publicly available in May 2023.

Current available languages:

• english
• italian

To add other languages feel free to submit pull requests copying from it.json and it.js.
Tip: edit APP_LOCALE in your .env file to change the language.

Secondary features

You can add custom HTML (which includes js and css code) in many pages enabling the EDIT_CUSTOM_HTML feature in your .env file.
When you finished to edit the HTML in the settings page you should disable this feature back.
It supports (via settings) the PDF and ZIP downloads of chapters/volumes.

Screenshots

Click the images to open it.

Current version

The master version usually is stable because branches are merged after being tested in production on differents websites.
If you see my last commit is old, you can consider the master branch stable, I just forgot to tag.
Sometime I merge dependabot's pull requests on master without rebuilding the application because most of them are only for development.

The current stable version is based on Laravel 9 and requires PHP >=8.0.
Older versions are not mainted at all.

Installation

Important

If you get forbidden 403 with images perform manually cd public; ln -s ../storage/app/public storage.
Installing automatic cronjobs is not required, but is strongly recommended, otherwise you should run them manually from time to time.
Why are cron jobs useful? Because they clear the database and file system of unused data.
If after months you notice that the Reader is slowing down, you are probably not running the cronjobs.

Settings

All configurable settings are listed in the .env.example file and explained in config/app.php.
Most of them are only set during installation. After installation you can customise your reader using the settings menu in the admin dashboard.
After editing your .env file you should run php artisan config:cache. If you don't have access to your server, you can go to the settings menu in the admin dashboard and press the "save" button: it will do a config:cache by itself.

How to

# If you want you can specify a tag
git clone https://github.com/FedericoHeichou/PizzaReader.git pizzareader
cd pizzareader

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

cd public; ln -s ../storage/app/public storage
sed -i 's/RewriteEngine On/RewriteEngine On\n    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^\(.+\)\\.reader\\.pizzareader\\.local$   [NC]\n    RewriteRule ^\(.*\)$ https:\/\/reader\\.pizzareader\\.local%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,QSA,NC,L]/g' .htaccess
cd ..

php composer.phar install --no-dev
cp .env.example .env
sed -i 's/^\(APP_NAME=\).*$/\1PizzaReader/' .env
sed -i "s,^\(APP_URL=\).*$,\1https:\/\/reader.pizzareader.local," .env
sed -i "s/^\(DB_HOST=\).*$/\1pizzareader.mysql.db/" .env
sed -i "s/^\(DB_PORT=\).*$/\13306/" .env
sed -i "s/^\(DB_DATABASE=\).*$/\1pizzareader/" .env
sed -i "s/^\(DB_USERNAME=\).*$/\1pizzareader/" .env
sed -i "s/^\(DB_PASSWORD=\).*$/\1password/" .env

# If you want to change the language, you need to replace the value of "APP_LOCALE".

sed -i "s/APP_ENV=production/APP_ENV=local/" .env
# sed -i "s/APP_DEBUG=false/APP_DEBUG=true/" .env
php composer.phar dump-autoload
php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate
php artisan db:seed
sed -i "s/APP_ENV=local/APP_ENV=production/" .env
# sed -i "s/APP_DEBUG=true/APP_DEBUG=false/" .env
php artisan config:cache
php composer.phar dump-autoload

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;
# Maybe you need to chmod/chown the upload's directory

You are now ready to register and login at /admin.

Update

How to update your reader:

php artisan down --render='maintenance' --secret='YourCustomSecret' || php artisan down
# You can bypass maintenance mode by visiting your site with the secret URI you choose, for example https://pizzareader.local/YourCustomSecret
git pull origin master
php composer.phar install --no-dev
php artisan cache:clear
php artisan config:cache
php artisan migrate
php artisan up

Cron

To run cronjobs add to the local crontab

* * * * * cd /path-to-your-reader && /usr/bin/php artisan schedule:run > /dev/null 2>&1

If you have not a local crontab you can run in a remote one

* * * * * /usr/bin/curl "https://your-reader.local/cron.php?t=$(date +%s)" 2>&1

Cron config

Some cronjobs can be configured.
For example you can set CRON_VIEWS_CLEAR_DAYS in your .env to specify the value passed with --days to views:clear command.
All configurable settings are listed in the .env.example file.

FAQ

Sometime I add features or bugfix who requires you to run manually certain commands for readers updated from old versions.
You can read these FAQs to findout if you have some of problems listed here and how to solve them.

There are orphaned ZIPs

First execute the command with --dry-run to emulate the clear:

php artisan downloads:clear --dry-run

Then if you like the output run:

php artisan downloads:clear

Some comics covers are not resized

If your homepage is very heavy because your tumbnails are too big, run:

php artisan thumbnail:resize

Thumbnail with a small size will be regenerated.
Usually there should be already resized thumbnail, but comics created in a very old version of the reader could not have it.

Manually clear views table

If your views table is very big, it means you are not running a cron.
Anyway you can manually clear views table:

php artisan views:clear --days=30

It will remove all views older than N days (default 30).
Note: it will not decrease the views counter, it only remove the combinations of (ip, chapter), which means a user who read a chapter one month ago will increase the counter again in the next visit.

Manually clear rating table

I don't suggest to perform this action if your table is not so big, but sums and counts used to calculate the average ratings are stored with the chapters too.
The rating table has three purposes:

• preventing an IP address to vote the same chapter multiple times
• as a fallback for chapters who are voted last time in a old version of the reader (<=v1.0.1)
• as a fallback if a row of the chapters table is broken (for example if someone manually set rating_sum to 0 and users lower their rating it prevents a negative rating_sum and recalculate them from the ratings table).

If you don't care and still need to clear the table I suggest to perform a backup of chapters and ratings tables then run:

php artisan ratings:clear --days=30

If you need to recover a deletion, reimport the ratings table then set to 0 all rating_count of chapters you need to recalculate; the next vote will force a recalculation of sums, counts and averages of voted chapter.

Some pages are not in the filesystem

Sometime for reasons some pages are missing in the filesystem (for example you uploaded some chapters with unstable connection without checking the result).
This command will get all pages in the database and checks if they exists in the filesystem.
The missing pages will be printed.
Adding --csv will show the comics, chapter and page in a human readable mode with a link to the missing page instead of the only file's absolute path (you can normally open it with Excel too).

php artisan pages:check
php artisan pages:check --csv

There are many files with no extension in the storage

If you are using a local cache (this is the default and most web service providers do not have caching capabilities), the reader will write its cache files to storage/framework/cache/data.
In addition, if you have enabled rate limiting in the API to prevent malicious IPs from making too many requests in a few seconds, a small file will be created for each IP.
If you notice you have thousands of files it means you are not running cronjobs or you are using an old version of the reader, in fact in the latest version a garbage collector (GC) has been added and it clears the filesystem by itself.
You can run the garbage collector manually by running php artisan cache:gc --progress.

Donations

Donations are appreciated, feel free to contact me at the email listed in my profile: FedericoHeichou.