Create Your Own Self-hosted, Internet-facing, Production-ready Audiobookshelf Server

Benjamin Porter
12 min readMar 11, 2024

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A large and spacious personal library with warm and inviting lighting
Image of an incredible home library that I wish I had, generated using DALL-E 3

Introduction

Audiobookshelf is one of my favorite pieces of software nowadays. As a lover of audiobooks, but a despiser of DRM, Audiobookshelf is a real boon. I can buy my audiobooks from DRM-free stores like Downpour and libro.fm and load them into my Audiobookshelf instance and enjoy a user experience better than anything Audible can provide. See the bottom of this post for some suggestions of where to get DRM-free audiobooks.

But for most people there is a downside. Audiobookshelf is server-side open source software. It can be run relatively easily on your PC, but what if you want an internet-facing cloud instance that your family can use without being on your home network? One that has the bandwidth of a data center rather than being limited to your home internet upload speeds?

Here is a guide for that scenario. By following this guide, you will have yourself a production-ready instance (server) of Audiobookshelf. I’ll even help…

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Benjamin Porter

Ben Porter is a Software Engineer who specializes in distributed applications (like web apps). He is currently Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Ameelio.org