ppf.webref

ppf.webref is a web app providing an interface to a JabRef SQL database. It allows you to access your references from anywhere in the world and from any device with a web browser. You do not need to install Java, you do not need to install an app. Any non-archaic phone, tablet, PC, Mac, or Raspberry Pi will do.

Create a JabRef database (using your normal JabRef) and configure ppf.webref to point to this database. Voila: Your references just became accessible worldwide.

Note: ppf.webref provides read-only access to your library. To add, edit, or delete entries from your library, you still need a standard JabRef installation somewhere.

Installation

Prerequisite: You need JabRef to create, edit, and extend your library.

Install ppf.webref:

pip install ppf.webref

Then, tell ppf.webref about your database by adding a section as follows to ~/.config/ppf.webref/ppf.webref.conf (create it if it does not exist):

[database]
server = <server>:<port>
databasename = <name of your jabref database>
username = <username ppf.webref should use to access db>
password = <password ppf.webref should use to access db>

Finally, run

flask --app ppf.webref run

and point your webbrowser to http://localhost:5000.

This will start ppf.webref on your local machine which is nice for testing. To get the most out of ppf.webref, you will probably want to run ppf.webref on a web server.

As we have not created any users yet, we can't login. To create users, open your JabRef database (the one named in the config file above) and run this sql-code (make sure you don't have a table with this name already):

create table user (
	id INT auto_increment,
	username varchar(20) character set utf8 not null,
	password char(80) character set ascii not null,
	primary key (id),
	unique(username)
)

Now we have a user table but no users in it, yet. Let's find a password and hash it with the following python code (of course, we replace the dummy password with your own password beforehand):

import bcrypt

password = 'This is my password'

bytes = password.encode('utf-8')
salt = bcrypt.gensalt()
print(bcrypt.hashpw(bytes, salt))

The output looks something like this:

b'$2b$12$1royHRBq6o/mbDdO7LjR8eaThWYErI6HLLdn7MBfajtpRLlwWSJ8m'

Now add your user to the user table in you JabRef database using this sql-code (again, replace "webref" with your username and the password hash with the hash you generated above):

insert into user (username, password)
values (
	"webref",
	"$2b$12$1royHRBq6o/mbDdO7LjR8eaThWYErI6HLLdn7MBfajtpRLlwWSJ8m"
);

Now we are ready to go.