LANraragi

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 747 words

One archive file, one work. That rule is the entire difference between LANraragi and the rest of the comic-server field, and it decides whether you should use it. If your collection is folders of chapters and volumes for ongoing series, Komga or Kavita will model it correctly and LANraragi will not. If your collection is thousands of self-contained zips, each a complete doujinshi, one-shot or artbook, then LANraragi is the tool built for exactly that, and the series-oriented servers will fight you on every import.

The install is one container, with Redis inside it

The official image bundles the Perl application and a Redis instance, so the compose file is short:

services:
  lanraragi:
    image: difegue/lanraragi:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - /srv/archives:/home/koyomi/lanraragi/content
      - ./lrr-db:/home/koyomi/lanraragi/database
      - ./lrr-thumbs:/home/koyomi/lanraragi/thumb

Point the content mount at your archive directory, start it, and log in with the default password kamimamita, which you change immediately in settings. The first launch indexes every archive and generates thumbnails, which on a 10,000-file library takes an hour or two of CPU and is the only time you will see the process use much of anything. Steady state is a couple of hundred MB, in line with the 256 MB minimum. The thumbnail volume is regenerable; the database volume is the one to back up, because it holds every tag you have ever assigned.

Tags come from plugins, and plugins are the product

LANraragi ships with metadata plugins that read a filename, look up the work on the sites this genre lives on, and write back tags: artist, group, series, language, category, plus the free-form ones. A batch tagging queue runs a chosen plugin across untagged archives while you sleep. Filename convention matters a great deal here: [Artist] Title (Series) [Language] is the shape the bundled parser expects, and a well-named library is 90 percent tagged before any plugin runs. Downloader plugins pull archives straight into the content folder from a URL.

Tags are namespaced (artist:name, series:name) and search is a comma-separated boolean over them with a handful of special keywords, so artist:someone, -language:chinese does what you would expect. Categories, static or search-based, give you shelves. Tankoubon groups several archives into one collected volume without merging the files.

Reading on a phone is a solved problem

The built-in reader is responsive and remembers position per archive. Off the LAN, the more comfortable route is the Mihon (Tachiyomi) extension, which speaks LANraragi's API and downloads for offline reading, and there is an OPDS catalogue for generic readers. Behind a reverse proxy it works fine over the internet; the app itself has one password and no user accounts, which is the reason to put it behind your VPN rather than on a public subdomain. It is a single-user server by design.

By default anyone who reaches the URL can read the library without logging in; the password only protects the settings and the upload and edit functions. If you must expose it, turn on No-Fun Mode in settings, which requires the admin login for any page at all. That is the whole access model, one switch and one password, which is fine over a VPN and thin over the open internet.

Formats: what it opens and what it will not

Zip, cbz, rar, cbr, 7z, tar, lzma, xz, PDF and epub all open. Loose folders of images do not; the file must be an archive. That is the "archive files only" limitation in the catalogue, and the fix is a one-line zip -r per folder before import. RAR and 7z work but decompress on the fly, so cbz is the fastest choice for anything you will reread.

What I'd do

For a doujinshi and one-shot collection: LANraragi in Docker on any box with 256 MB to spare, archives named to the [Artist] Title convention before import, batch tagging run overnight with the bundled plugins, Mihon on the phone, and the whole thing reachable only over Tailscale. Back up the database directory weekly. For an ongoing manga or western comics library, do not bend LANraragi into shape: run Komga alongside it, since both are light enough to coexist, and let each server hold the collection it was built for. The ebooks and comics category lists the alternatives.