Introduction

Grimoire is a self-hosted web application for managing your tabletop RPG PDF collection. It runs as a Docker container, mounts your existing library folder, and gives you a clean browser-based UI to browse, search, and read your books from any device on your network.

What it does

• Organizes your PDFs by game system and category, derived automatically from your folder structure, with no manual tagging required to get started
• Indexes every page of every PDF for full-text search using SQLite FTS5, including OCR of image-only scanned PDFs
• Renders PDF pages server-side as WebP images so the reader is fast even on mobile
• Tracks maps, tokens, audio, and archive files alongside books in the same library, with a persistent global audio player
• Supports campaigns (with a notes wiki, character sheets, and guest invites), bookmarks, favorites, OPDS feeds, and OpenID Connect authentication
• Builds characters on live, schema-driven sheets for D&D 5e, Pathfinder, Draw Steel, Call of Cthulhu and more, with a searchable catalogue of each system's open content

What it writes

Grimoire reads from your library folder and only writes to it when you ask it to. Browsing, searching, reading, and metadata editing never touch your files. Two admin-only features do write: file management (upload, move, rename, delete) and sidecar export. Both need the library mounted writable, which is the default; mount it :ro and the rest of Grimoire works unchanged. See Volumes.

If you add or reorganize files from outside Grimoire, trigger a Rescan in the UI to pick the changes up.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	FastAPI (async Python 3.12)
Database	SQLite with FTS5 full-text search
PDF rendering	PyMuPDF → WebP
Frontend	React 19 and TypeScript, served by the FastAPI backend
Optional cache	Valkey / Redis (page image cache)
Auth	JWT + optional OpenID Connect

License

GNU General Public License v3.0. Source on GitHub.