citadel

Citadel

Manage your ebook library with Citadel. Backwards compatible with Calibre.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7db593a9-2095-4ac9-8f38-45107cc059dd

Project goals

• Backwards compatible with Calibre: Calibre must be able to read any library that Citadel has edited.
• Good UX: Citadel must be easy to use and look good.
• Performant: Citadel must feel much faster than Calibre, and never slower.

Non-goals

• Ebook reader: Citadel is not an ebook reader. There are already excellent ereader apps: Citadel will open your files in your default apps.
• ...or editor: If you're editing ebook content (not metadata like titles), Citadel will not be a replacement for you.
• 100% feature parity: Primarily around Plugins, but there are some advanced features of Calibre we'll likely never build.

Downloading

Stable builds are available in Releases.

Development builds are available from GitHub actions.

Please report any issues or crashes you experience while using any version of Citadel!

Installing on macOS

Download the .dmg from Releases, drag Citadel to Applications, and open it.

[!NOTE]

Development builds from GitHub Actions are not signed. macOS will report those as "damaged"; removing the quarantine attribute resolves this:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Citadel.app/

Developing

As a prerequisite, you'll need to install Bun and Rust.

Then, you can install the packages.

bun install

and start up the app like so:

bun run dev
# or just bun dev

Lint & Formatting

To lint all source code, run bun lint. To autoformat, run bun format.

Scope	Action	Command
All code	Format	bun format
All code	Format (Check)	bun format:check
All code	Lint	bun lint
Backend	Format	bun format:backend
Backend	Lint	bun lint:backend
Frontend	Format	bun format:web
Frontend	Lint	bun lint:web

App preview without backend

You can run just the frontend with this command, although you WILL see errors as the Rust backend will be missing but is assumed to exist:

bun dev:app

Building

To create a production version of Citadel, you'll need the development prereqs. Then:

bun install
bun run build

Auto-updater and releases

Citadel can check for app updates and install them on request. Automatic update checks can be disabled in Settings (Auto updates: On/Off), and installs are always explicit (Install and restart). For maintainer setup and release workflow details, see docs/updater-and-releases.md.

Additional Credit & Related Projects

This project would not be possible without the north star created by Kovid Goyal, Calibre. Without his hard work building such an extensive and powerful tool, Citadel would not exist.

Huge thanks to Kemie Guaida, who created an excellent Calibre redesign Figma prototype, from which Citadel takes inspiration. Thank you, Kemie!