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Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets

(www.librari.io)
81 points hmkoyan | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 19:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.301s | source

I've been working on librari.io for the past several months and just launched the beta version.

The Problem: I have 500+ books across multiple rooms in my house and was desperately looking for an app to manage them properly. Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.

What I Built:

- Multiple libraries: manage collections in different locations

- Location tracking - remember exactly which shelf each book is on

- Loan management - track books you've lent to friends

- Custom fields & tags - store any additional book info the way YOU think about them

- Reading progress tracking - dates, duration, personal ratings

- Modern UI/UX - clean & actually enjoyable to use

Current Status:

- Beta version live

- Working on improving the responsiveness of the app and addressing initial user feedback

Would love feedback! Especially curious about:

- What features would make YOU actually use a library management app?

- UI/UX feedback always welcome

- Any book collectors here who'd be interested in beta testing?

Looking forward to your thoughts! Thank you in advance.

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travisgriggs ◴[18 Jul 25 23:54 UTC] No.44611159[source]▶
Care to share any thoughts about what tech stack you've used to put this together? Which libraries/frameworks you used, whether you would again if you were starting again today. I don't have a need for this app personally, but I love hearing the (candid) experience reports when people build nice things like this.
replies(1): >>44613023 #
1. hmkoyan ◴[19 Jul 25 06:16 UTC] No.44613023[source]▶
Yes, I can certainly be open and provide a lot of detail. The landing page is a standard Next.js application hosted on Vercel. The web app itself is a React app that uses Shadcn, Tailwind CSS and TanStack/React-Query, and the backend is a Node.js application. I use PostgreSQL and Redis instances to store data in the long and short term, respectively. For deployment, I use Dokploy, which is an excellent way of deploying stuff in containers and making them communicate with each other (and actually this is my first time that I use it). You can self-host it on a VPS, which is what I do. Finally, I use AWS S3 for object storage and backups.

I would definitely use this tech stack again if I were to start again. The only thing that may change in the future, when there's a lot of traffic, is how the app is served and hosted overall. Currently, it's on a VPS, but depending on the traffic volume, it would make sense to switch to AWS infra (e.g. using lambdas etc) at some point in the future.