Can't download books with COPS, yet reading online is possible

[mwcem]

Hi,
I installed COPS as a subdirectory of the folder web, and it starts alright, displaying all my books. Path of calibre-library is /volume1/books/calibre. Yet something must be wrong still as I cannot download a single book I have. But if I choose to read the book online in the browser it works alright - so where is my mistake?

You can try out here for yourselves: mwcem.synology.me/cops

Don't know what I'm doing wrong.

[marioscube]

Are you on a Synology?

[mwcem]

Yes. DS418play, DSM 7.1

[marioscube]

Take a look at the Wiki.

Common steps number 2

Did this work?

[mwcem]

Not really. My books are in /volume1/books/calibre together with calibre's metadata.db. This folder is included in the openbase_dir and also set in the config_local.php file.
So this should be alright, or am I missing something?

[marioscube]

Have you restarted the webserver?

Are the permissions of the calibre directory http:http?

[mwcem]

Yes, all permissions granted. As you can see by the link I provided earlier, you can skip through the whole catalog. Even reading the books online is possible. The only thing not working is downloading the files - this always results in a classical 404-page.

[marioscube]

Ok (not OK).

Back to basic troubleshooting.

1 - http:///cops/checkconfig.php = OK?
2 - please post your config_local.php
3 - please post your open_basedir settings
4 - please post the permissions of /volume1/books/calibre and /volume1/books/calibre/metadata.db + a few books

I then can try to recreate your setup and see if I can reproduce your 404 error.

The only major problem is that I only have an obsolete version of a synology with DSM 5.2, but linux = linux I hope.

[mwcem]

books.zip
Can't show you the rights of metadata.db at the moment as I'm not before my normal computer at home, but at work, where I can only connect via quickconnect. And DS-Filestation has the restriction, that it doesn't display the contents of a folder, when it has more than 100 subfolders, which is naturally the case when you got a rather broad library and calibre creates a folder for each author.

[marioscube]

Hmmmmm.....

I can reproduce your error 404.

1 - COPS seems to be installed OK and working
2 - PHP open_basedir is OK
3 - the calibre database is not the problem

The problem seems to be that either mod_rewrite is not installed or working or the .htaccess file in the COPS directory is not installed or not working.

On your Synology what is your webserver? NGINX or Apache2
If NGINX, I can't help you. I never understood it and gave up years ago. Maybe the wiki can give you some pointers.
If Apache2:

• is there an .htaccess setting in a synology control panel? (Not in my version, but yours may be different)
• is there a .htaccess file in the COPS directory (edit this file with a deliberate error, for example just put a 3 on an empty line. If COPS does not work the .htaccess file is read and we know more (then revert the edit). If there is no error the .htaccess file is not read and we should edit config files...... (don't really want to do that on a synology).

As a last resort you can always run COPS from a Docker container.

[mwcem]

Trouble identified - and solved.
The Web Station had under "Standardserver" the NGINX as HTTP-Backend-Server. I changed ist to Apache 2.4, restarted the Web Station (and all it's dependent packages), and now it works just fine - thanks for helping in identifying the bad guy.
Perhaps you should stress this in the Wiki more promenently, that any NGINX is just a trouble-maker.
(The change to Apache 2.4 solved some troubles I had with other apps as well).

[mwcem]

Maybe for clarification:
I had defined a webservice-portal for COPS with Apache 2.4, PHP 7.4 and a certain port, and web/cops as entry-point:


Therefor I assumed, that Apache was used, when I entered the COPS-Url. On Standardserver (80/443) NGINX was defined, which I know changed to Apache. So obviously I don't need to install special portals for web-applications as they are not used anyways. Don't know why I did it then - must have read somewhere that it's vital important, but propably it's just confusing and not useful at all.
Again thanks for pointing in the right direction.

[marioscube]

Great!
However it should also work with NGINX, but I do not know how.

I am not the developer of COPS, nor the maintainer of the WIKI. I am a (very) happy user of COPS since very early versions. So I know something about how to use and configure COPS on Apache2.
The developer of COPS seems to have gone on with his life (as is his right).

[marioscube]

Maybe as an additional point.

If you open your COPS to the WWW I would password protect it.