Mankai Server

A self-hosted manga server with an admin dashboard that implements the Mankai HTTP API for the Mankai manga reader.

Point the Mankai app at http://<host>:3000/api, sign in, and your library and reading progress sync across devices.

Features

• Full Mankai API support: server info, JWT auth, manga browsing, search, suggestions, and the in-app editor API.
• Web admin dashboard for managing manga, chapter groups, chapters, page images, covers, and users.
• Semantic search and autocomplete powered by local sentence embeddings (Xenova/bge-m3) indexed with pgvector.
• Installed plugins, browsable plugins, reading progress, and saved-library sync with an incremental endpoint.
• PostgreSQL + pgvector in production, or embedded PGlite for zero-config setups.
• JWT Bearer tokens for the app, session cookies for the dashboard, and auto-generated API keys per user.

Quick start (Docker Compose)

docker-compose.yml runs the server alongside a pgvector/pgvector:pg18 Postgres instance.

1. Edit docker-compose.yml and change the placeholder secrets under the app service's environment block:

environment:
  SESSION_SECRET: changeme123-make-sure-it-is-at-least-32-characters
  JWT_SECRET: changeme123-make-sure-it-is-at-least-32-characters
  SERVER_ID: mankai-server
  ADMIN_EMAIL: admin@mankai.local
  ADMIN_PASSWORD: changeme123
  # Optional, takes precedence over ADMIN_PASSWORD. Escape each $ as $$.
  # ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH: "$$argon2id$$..."
  # BASE_API_URL: https://api.example.app
  # EMBEDDING_QUANTIZED: "0"
  # FORCE_SECURE_COOKIE: "true"
  # LOG_LEVEL: debug

2. Build and start:

docker compose up -d --build

On startup the container runs migrations, seeds the admin user from ADMIN_EMAIL and either ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH or ADMIN_PASSWORD (idempotent), and serves the app on port 3000.

ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH takes precedence when both are set and is stored directly without rehashing. It must be a valid password hash supported by Bun.password.verify, such as Argon2 or bcrypt. An invalid hash stops admin seeding. If no hash is provided, ADMIN_PASSWORD must contain at least 8 characters.

Generate a hash with Bun, escaped for use in docker-compose.yml:

bun -e 'console.log((await Bun.password.hash("your-password-here")).replaceAll("$", () => "$$"))'

3. Open http://localhost:3000 for the dashboard, or add a server in the Mankai app with base URL http://<host>:3000/api.

Data is persisted on the host under ./data.

docker compose logs -f app
docker compose restart app
docker compose down