calibre-web OPDS on iPhone & iPad: The Exact URL and Login

Quick answer: calibre-web's OPDS feed is at http://<your-server>:8083/opds. It asks for the same username and password you use for the calibre-web web interface, over HTTP Basic authentication, and your browser session does not carry over, so you type them again in the reader app. Calibre-Web-Automated uses exactly the same address and the same login. Add that URL as a custom OPDS catalog in a reader on your iPhone or iPad and your Calibre library is there.

Everything below was checked on 2026-08-24 against calibre-web 0.6.27 and Calibre-Web-Automated v4.0.6, both run from their official images against a real Calibre library, rather than copied from documentation.

The address, and the three things that go wrong

1. The web session does not authenticate the feed

This is the one that catches people who have calibre-web open in a browser tab and assume the reader will be let in the same way. It will not. The feed is Basic authentication, entirely separate from the cookie your browser holds, and it returns 401 with a WWW-Authenticate header until you supply a username and password.

That is good news for setup: any OPDS reader that supports username and password will connect. In justRead, you add the server once with the URL, the username and the password, and it is remembered.

2. A redirect instead of a feed means the server is unconfigured

Before calibre-web is pointed at a Calibre database, every path on it, /opds included, returns a 302 to /admin/dbconfig. If your reader reports something odd rather than asking for a password, open http://<your-server>:8083/ in a browser. If it sends you to a database configuration page, the URL was never the problem: an administrator has to set the Calibre library path first.

Calibre-Web-Automated does not have this problem. It arrives with a library already configured and serves OPDS on first boot, which is worth knowing if you are choosing between the two and want the phone working today.

3. Port 8083, not 8080

8080 is the Calibre Content Server, which is a different program from calibre-web and which we cover in the Calibre Content Server guide. The two are constantly confused, and mixing up their ports produces a connection failure that looks like a network problem.

They also differ on authentication in a way that matters here: the Calibre Content Server has no authentication at all by default, while calibre-web always demands it. If your reader connected to one Calibre-ish server without asking for a password, that was the Content Server.

What you get once it connects

The calibre-web OPDS root serves fifteen sections. All fifteen were present in both versions tested:

Alphabetical Books, Hot Books, Top Rated Books, Recently added Books, Random Books, Read Books, Unread Books, Authors, Publishers, Categories, Series, Languages, Ratings, File formats, Shelves.

That is the same shape as the web interface, which is the point: the metadata you curated in Calibre, the series, the ratings, the custom shelves, comes across rather than flattening into one long list.

Search is exposed twice, as a templated /opds/search/{searchTerms} and as an OpenSearch descriptor at /opds/osd, so a reader that supports server-side search can query the server instead of downloading everything and searching locally. That difference matters at a few thousand books.

calibre-web vs Calibre-Web-Automated: what actually differs

Calibre-Web-Automated is an actively developed fork that adds automatic ingest, conversion and metadata handling on top of calibre-web. The obvious question for a phone is whether its OPDS feed is different.

We ran both side by side and compared the feeds. The answer is: same URL, same authentication, and exactly one extra section.

Calibre-Web Automated      (feed title)
Calibre-Web

Magic Shelves              (present in CWA only)

Everything else is identical: /opds, HTTP Basic, and the same fifteen sections in the same order. Anything true of calibre-web's OPDS is true of CWA's.

The one practical difference is not in the feed at all. CWA ships with a library configured and answers on first boot; plain calibre-web redirects everything to /admin/dbconfig until someone sets the database path.

Connecting it on an iPhone or iPad

1. Find your server's address on the network. A local IP such as 192.168.1.20, or a hostname if you have one. Pin it in your router's DHCP reservations, otherwise the address changes and the catalog stops working for no visible reason.
2. Confirm the feed in a browser first. Open http://<your-server>:8083/opds. You should be asked for a username and password, and then see a wall of XML. If you are redirected to a setup page, go back to point 2 above.
3. Add it in your reader as a custom OPDS catalog: the URL, your calibre-web username, your calibre-web password.
4. Browse and download. OPDS hands over files rather than streaming pages, so a book is downloaded to the device and read there. That also means it keeps working when you are away from the server, and that your reading position stays on the phone rather than syncing back to calibre-web.

For the general version of these steps across any server, see how to set up OPDS on iPhone and iPad.

Reaching it from outside your home

Inside your own network, plain HTTP is fine and is the simplest thing that works.

From outside, do not simply forward port 8083. Two approaches are worth the effort:

• A reverse proxy with a real certificate. Caddy or nginx in front of calibre-web, with a certificate from Let's Encrypt, gives you HTTPS that iOS trusts without any device configuration.
• A VPN or a mesh network back to your own LAN, after which the local address works unchanged from anywhere.

What does not work casually is a self-signed certificate. iOS refuses one unless the certificate is installed on the device and explicitly trusted under Settings, General, About, Certificate Trust Settings. Until then the connection simply fails, and the failure looks exactly like the server being down rather than like a certificate problem.

Common failures, in the order they usually happen

"It asks for a password and rejects the right one." calibre-web has its own user accounts, separate from any operating system login. Use the account you log into calibre-web's web interface with. The default on a fresh install is admin with the password admin123, which you should change before anything is reachable from outside.

"I get a redirect, not a feed." The database path is not configured. See above.

"It worked yesterday and not today." Almost always the server's IP address changed. Reserve it in your router.

"The catalog is empty." calibre-web is pointed at a Calibre library that has no books in it, or at a directory that is not a Calibre library. The web interface will look equally empty; check there first, because the feed only ever reflects what calibre-web itself can see.

"Some books do not download." calibre-web serves the formats present in your Calibre library. If a book exists only as AZW3 or MOBI, convert it to EPUB in Calibre on the desktop and the converted format appears in the feed.

Where this sits among the other options

If your books are in Calibre and you want them on an iPhone, there are three routes and they are genuinely different:

• calibre-web, this page: a web front end that runs without the Calibre desktop app open, with user accounts and an OPDS feed at :8083/opds.
• The Calibre Content Server, at :8080/opds, which is built into Calibre itself and needs the desktop app or calibre-server running. It has no authentication until you enable it. See the Content Server guide.
• A cloud folder or direct file copy, which needs no server at all. See how to sync Calibre to iPhone and iPad.

justRead connects to all three, and to Komga, Kavita, COPS and any other OPDS server, with per-server filtering and pagination so a large library stays usable on a phone. The OPDS reader page carries the verified URL and authentication method for every server we have tested, and the free OPDS catalogues list covers public catalogues rather than your own.

Download justRead on the App Store and point it at your calibre-web server.