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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/Oromei on 2025-02-14 00:01:48+00:00.
It’s been about 3ish years since I originally posted about Stump, original post, and I wanted to post this follow-up to highlight how far it’s come, what’s still missing, and where I’d like it to be hopefully within the next couple of years.
Some additional context for those who aren’t familiar: Stump is just another self hosted media server for digital books (manga, comics, ebooks, etc). It isn’t as fully featured or developed as others in this space (e.g. Kavita, Komga). I originally started the project to better learn Rust. It has some bugs and rough edges, but it’s since grown into something that more closely resembles a proper tool.
What’s new
3 years is a long time and there have been way too many fixes, features, changes, and overall improvements to enumerate them all. If you haven’t seen Stump since my original post, it’s almost a different app imo.
In broad categories, the highlights would be:
- Basic features: ZIP, RAR, PDF, and EPUB support (I believe only ZIP was supported when I originally posted), built-in readers, scheduled scans, permission-based access control, built-in CLI, thumbnail generation options, email to device, etc - I can’t list them all
- Performance: I’ll caveat this by saying that the scanner is likely a bit slower than it used to be. This is because I’ve added a lot of safety features, persisted error logs, etc, that weren’t present before. So instead of blazing through, it has more safe guards and tracking. Granted, I still think it’s very fast. For example, It onboards ~1200 books with metadata and hashing in 6 seconds (native debug build on an M1 laptop, YMMV this isn't a standard setup)
- Design: This is obviously subjective, but I’m very happy with the UI patterns I’ve solidified. It isn’t perfect, and definitely has a few sore spots, but I try to be thoughtful with the designs overall
A couple of specific features I’m really happy to have added:
- Smart lists: It’s basically a query builder to construct complex filters on books. Not fully featured yet, e.g. it needs virtualization on the UI, but it was really cool and fun to implement
- Standalone SDK: I developed an SDK package (TypeScript) which any community project can use to build a Stump app. I haven’t published it to NPM, but it’s easy to do if the demand was there for custom integrations/tooling
- UI customization: Support custom, code-based themes (CSS down the road), adjust the app layout and navigation
- File explorer: You can browse library files directly in the web app in a view more like a file explorer
- Koreader sync: You can configure Stump as a sync server in Koreader
- API Keys: You can configure API keys for interacting with the API
What’s missing
There’s a lot I’d like to build into Stump but, of course, never enough time. While I’m very happy with and proud of Stump as it exists today, I recognize it’s missing a lot of QoL features in general, but I think more specifically for power users and/or metadata curators. To list a few:
- Story arcs and other book-relating concepts
- In-app metadata fetching, matching, and editing
- File watching and auto-scanning
- More book analysis tools and statistics (I like charts)
- Bulk management
- Declarative library patterns
- A bit better job queue management (e.g, large job cancellation)
And a lot more.
Long term goals
More ambitious goals include:
- Dedicated mobile and desktop apps: The desktop app is close to fruition, it mostly needs the installer and CI built out, and then of course testing. It can serve as your primary server instance or just a remote client. There is a PoC mobile app, it can browse OPDS feeds and connect your Stump instance for bare-bones browsing and reading (comics only for now, but ebooks eventually). It isn't close to ready yet though, maybe by the end of the year
- Book club features: This is a personal favorite. I’d love to be able to better facilitate hosting book clubs
- More library patterns: Stump supports two primary organizational methods, plus the file explorer, but eventually I want to make it more configurable. The goal would be you could decoratively define the scanner behavior, and the two existing patterns would operate as presets of sorts in the new system
- Analytics: Better visualizations and insights into server activity, performance, etc
- SSO / OAuth: Optionally configure alternative auth methods
- Audiobooks and alternate file versions: Some point soon I’d like to at least explore what it might take to support audiobooks, ideally in a way where you could read and listen at once if you have both files for a book. I find myself enjoying audio more lately, which is my primary drive tbh. However this would involve fundamentally breaking changes
That’s pretty much it! Obviously this is pretty ambitious for a project I build in my spare time, and seeing how I blew through my initial timeline goals I won’t hold my breath for timeline goals moving forward. I'd love any ideas or feedback, it is an active WIP
