HappyPandaX Support Thread


Recommended Posts

Please note:
The author of the application is aware that the software needs rework.
This is ongoing at the moment, so if you find the application to be a bit

hard to work with, maybe you want to be a bit patient and wait for the

rework progressing. As it is now, with fiddling the app can be made to work,

but it's not very smooth. I still think this application provides a great benefit

to the community of doujinshi collectors and am not going to pull the

(marked as beta in CAs as before) template for it.


Thank you and happy reading! :)

_______________________________________

 

 

 

Hello and I am glad you're stopping by to check out this support thread for my CA template for HappyPandaX.

 

From the application's author:

Quote

A cross-platform server and client application for managing and reading manga and doujinshi

 

This application itself is released in alpha-stage by the author themselves and this CA template is in beta.
I would appreciate if you could help me test this application. There are some known issues, e.g. downloading from Exhentai is limited to being logged in (go into About > Plugins and install the plugins that are available for a stock installation, click on "Open Plugin Site" for the EHentai Login plugin. Follow the instructions and help from there) and having credits for downloading available.

As for downloading from other pages, so far no luck for me on nhentai, however scraping metadata for existing doujinshi is working fine for me. You can stage your scans and metadata scrapes before you commit them to your collection. (Add > Scan)

 

GitHub Link

Application Author's Patreon, if you wanna support them :)

Documentation

 

The creator also is an artist and links to their various outlets on Patreon and Twitter.

 

Support for this CA in the context of the CA implementation is provided by me, however do keep in mind the application is alpha, the CA beta.

 

50736708-9dc37d80-11b8-11e9-8344-87faedd

 

50736713-a61bb880-11b8-11e9-99a6-748132b

 

 

Change Log (just the unRAID CA template)

2020 June 1: Initial release to CAs

 

 

Cheers and happy organizing!

Edited by Glassed Silver
Note about HPX getting reworked
  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
22 hours ago, Bandit_King said:

Why use this when you have ubooquity?  What this do different?

Hey, thank you for the interest in the subject in general.

 

I can only tell you where I am coming from and why I picked it, I'm sure many folks may handle their needs differently. Everyone has different priorities and desires after all. :)

 

So here is why I picked HPX for my doujinshi needs:

 

It has metadata scrapers built-in (through plugins) for the two staple sites to download doujinshi from (nhentai and ExHentai) as well as a plugin for reading metadata stored in an accompanying text file. This makes organizing a doujinshi collection, browsing it and discovering forgotten gems within your own collection a much smoother experience.

 

I am well aware there are plugins for calibre as well (I don't know about ubooquity), but calibre REALLY isn't made for this kind of medium as you'll be generating a lot of custom fields and I'd rather keep calibre, which I do use for fanfics and traditional books a good solution for what I throw at it rather than half-ass maintaining calibre.

HPX will also provide you with a beautiful WebUI to manage everything from, it has an API which the official HPX desktop client interfaces with as well, but I haven't gotten latter one to run yet. However all data in HPX is portable and I really like that. There is quite a few things very specific to doujinshi that make maintaining them in a traditional system not specifically made for it possible but less than ideal. So when I saw that there was a pretty popular tool for running a doujinshi server on github I jumped into it and created a little demo library. So far I'm liking it a lot and that's why I threw together a CA template for it so more people can try it and maybe get to like it as well.

 

The project may not have been updated in half a year now, but the dev is still active in the issue tracker and I believe that the state of the application right now already far exceeds anything else I've so far looked into to consider serving my doujinshi.


As for regular manga that are published properly and aren't doujinshi I'm using komga, but I am not quite satisfied with that so far. Just a few stones on the path to having a good download-managa-server-sync-reader stack there though. Rambling aside though, I don't need my doujinshi THAT portable, so if they only chill on my server and no Android reader app ever comes up to sync it to then I'll be fine. That'd be a limitation of HPX so far, at least until someone creates an Android app for the API which is after all possible.

 


Hope that clears it up a bit for you. If you have any further questions, go ahead and ask. :)

PS: Yes, interfacing metadata scraping with doujinshi.org would be nice, iirc that's planned as well.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, Bandit_King said:

Most people use ubooq I can read my comics from ubooq like a cloud on my apple device with the chunky comic app with the OPDS server.  I doubt happypandax can do that!!!

HappyPandaX is specifically made for doujinshi. (edit: added link to Wikipedia article for doujinshi, maybe it's a good idea to bring that term closer to an audience that hasn't come into contact with it so far? It is a pretty niche medium in the Western world after all. No hard feelings)

It's also still in development. I am by the way not the developer, so I don't even claim to be the PR rep, not quite sure why we're arguing about functionality that HPX doesn't supply (yet) when it does provide functionality that Ubooquity doesn't have. It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison.

 

You can read up about what HPX is for on their Github page, which I linked in the CA info for the template. Either you find a use for it or you don't. I don't even claim that it's a good utility for manga in general or even more broadly comics in general. I use something else for manga and comics myself, which I told you right away.

It is however excellent (from my observation, SO FAR! still testing myself mind you) for doujinshi. If you don't even deal with Doujinshi I'm sure you are - at least for now - way better off with software like Ubooquity that specializes in supporting more mainstream forms of readable illustrations like comics and manga.

 

 

It is not (so far at least, although I don't thinkk there are great ambitions to that...) a Ubooquity competitor.

Edited by Glassed Silver
Link to comment
8 hours ago, Theo999 said:

How to configure the config.yaml? I have added this file to the appdata folder according to the document but the edited options seems not working...

I configured it only through the settings interface in HPX itself, however first thought that comes to my mind is that you may wanna check the permissions of your yaml.

Link to comment
  • 2 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...
14 hours ago, rsx205 said:

is it possible to manage users from the HPX front end?

I'm not using the multi-user ability of the application and just use the default user for myself with a custom password, so I cannot comment on how or if it can be done like that, but the application's author is surely going to be a better source of information.

 

I can only provide support for the template itself and of course will help with anything I've gathered experience with so far on my own.

 

But maybe someone else can voice in? Anyhow, wish you all the best with the application, it is quite mighty and useful indeed.

Cheers!

Link to comment
4 hours ago, rsx205 said:

oh ok I see

is this configurable in the HPX front end as well or am I just totally overlooking stuff in the settings?

This should help you get there:

https://happypandax.github.io/usage.html#setting-up

 

and:

 

https://happypandax.github.io/usage.html#users

 

Honestly speaking, I think I had setup a password, but I did not. Ooops. I'm in what constitutes as basically a single-user network, nothing is exposed to the web, so this being the one application not guarded with a password did not irk me all that much yet. I'd still love to get there, because I'm a believer in a "secure-by-default" philosophy. (and yet I run unRAID, hehehehe..)

The reason I thought I had setup a password is because I always just blindly toss my password manager at everything and let it auto-fill, in this case simply fill a user name, just to have it setup for when I do use a password.

 

If you need any more help, considering I cannot really help atm, I'd suggest bringing it to the issue tracker of happypandax. The dev is very kind and should get back to you fairly soon with an issue like that! :)

 

Cheers and have fun setting it up!

Link to comment
On 10/3/2020 at 2:23 AM, rsx205 said:

oh ok I see

is this configurable in the HPX front end as well or am I just totally overlooking stuff in the settings?

I do not believe you are able to create a user from the HPX front end. You can set it through the cmd interface. After opening the console from the Unraid UI,

./happypandax/happypandax user create -t 'admin' -u 'username' -p 'password'

Flag -h will give you all the options. You can also see more options here Command Line Arguments

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/7/2020 at 1:35 PM, Glassed Silver said:

It is working on my end...

Maybe try deleting and re-adding the template with a clean config and cleared folders?

I did that, I'm still getting the same issue...

error.log gives me:

Oct-10 00:20:00--ERROR  happypanda.main: Failed to configure built-in ESearch server, process exit code: still running; also see /data/logs/esearch_stdout.log 
Oct-10 00:20:27--WARNING happypanda.main: Could not establish connection to ESearch server, aborting. 

esearch_stdout.log doesn't give any more clarity on the problem.

Link to comment

The config.yaml is not something that is shared in the appdata directory, it really needs to be. Also since the happypandax user the docker runs as is not root you cant install vi or nano in the docker image to edit that file that way ether.  Currently I am also seeing that its not following the content directory so everything downloaded seems to live in the appdata folder, but out of the two things that it downloaded from exhentai for me only one shows and the logs are less than helpful.

Link to comment

You may want to add the download directory as a configurable path since content appears to only be for uploading things and not where its placing files once they are in your library from what I can tell.  Since appdata is on peoples cache drive they will probably want to move those files to somewhere on a share.

Honestly this app is a bit confusing on its usage.

Link to comment

OK I see part of the problem looking at the docker install instructions from the github of happypandax you need to create the config.yaml and create a plugins directory in the data folder.  If you don't it will start creating those files in the docker image itself which you don't want.  It should look like bellow.  You can do that after the first start up, just stop it and do that then start it up.  It will start using the correct folders after that.

import:
    skip_existing_galleries: true
    transparent_nested_folders: true
watch:
    enable: true
    dirs:
    - /content
    options:
        /content:
            import.scan_on_startup: true
plugin:
    plugin_dir: /data/plugins
server:
    host: 0.0.0.0

The last line will allow you to use the desktop client to connect to the server

Edited by ChronoStriker1
Add to config
Link to comment
  • 3 weeks later...

So I added a huge folder to HPX and it seemed to add things well, I then added another data folder to the docker and brought it back up and it looks like the tags and artists are there but the gallery is empty. I tried scanning the folder again but it seems like nothing is showing up in the gallery.

 

Anything I can try?

Link to comment
2 hours ago, severanced said:

So I added a huge folder to HPX and it seemed to add things well, I then added another data folder to the docker and brought it back up and it looks like the tags and artists are there but the gallery is empty. I tried scanning the folder again but it seems like nothing is showing up in the gallery.

 

Anything I can try?

I figured it out myself! I tried reindexing and it looks like everything is back.

Link to comment
  • 1 month later...
On 1/10/2021 at 1:22 AM, xyzeratul said:

I'd say lanraragi is a much better choice, I tried hpx long time ago, totally a mess in UI management.

 

Maybe I should give it another go, see how things improved in one year.

Your comment made me look at Lanraragi, the damn thing doesn't work with folders of images, only archives, total dead weight out the door.

Link to comment
On 1/10/2021 at 2:22 PM, xyzeratul said:

I'd say lanraragi is a much better choice, I tried hpx long time ago, totally a mess in UI management.

 

Maybe I should give it another go, see how things improved in one year.

Agree with this, I liked the design of HPX but it was too buggy and unfinished for me. Dev did not seem terribly active either. LRR works smoothly for me, just a shame it's not as feature-rich as HPX with regards to tagging and organizing.

 

On 1/12/2021 at 2:33 PM, severanced said:

Your comment made me look at Lanraragi, the damn thing doesn't work with folders of images, only archives, total dead weight out the door.

This isn't much of a complaint, archives are the more common way of distributing manga online and more convenient overall IMO. If you have an existing library of content that is in folders, it's trivial to convert them to archives.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, MM23 said:

Agree with this, I liked the design of HPX but it was too buggy and unfinished for me. Dev did not seem terribly active either. LRR works smoothly for me, just a shame it's not as feature-rich as HPX with regards to tagging and organizing.

 

This isn't much of a complaint, archives are the more common way of distributing manga online and more convenient overall IMO. If you have an existing library of content that is in folders, it's trivial to convert them to archives.

Having to change the way you work so that the program itself functions is pretty bad logic, especially for something that the programmer has said would be trivial to implement but he won't because he doesn't organize his collection that way. That's pretty bad. I have 10,000's of doujins/manga and converting them to archives for another program that's less feature rich would be quite time consuming.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.