auto-novel/auto-novel

What is AutoNovel?

AutoNovel is a light‑novel machine‑translation bot that runs a public website (https://n.novelia.top/) where users can automatically generate translated versions of Japanese/Chinese light‑novels and share them.

Core idea

The project stitches together a web front‑end, an API service and a set of crawlers that pull novel content from the web (including Pixiv) and then run it through a machine‑translation pipeline. The result is a “light‑novel machine‑translation robot” – essentially an automated translator for this specific genre.

How to run it yourself

Warning – the authors note that the system is not designed for personal deployment and may break or become incompatible with future updates.

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/auto-novel/auto-novel.git
   cd auto-novel
   

2. Create a .env file with the required environment variables. Only the first two are needed for basic operation:

   • HTTPS_PROXY – optional proxy for fetching web novels.
   • PIXIV_COOKIE_PHPSESSID – optional Pixiv session cookie if you want to scrape novels from Pixiv.

   The remaining variables (ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, MAILGUN_*) are only needed for the full hosted service and can be left empty for a local test.

3. Start the containers

   mkdir -p -m 777 ./data/es/data ./data/es/plugins
   docker compose up -d
   

4. Visit the site at http://localhost in a browser.

What you need to know

• The stack is containerised with Docker Compose, so Docker must be installed.
• The project uses Elasticsearch (the ./data/es directories are prepared for it).
• No additional build steps are described; the Docker images are built by the CI workflows linked in the badge section.
• The service is primarily intended to be run as the public site; the README explicitly says personal deployment is not guaranteed to work.

License

The code is released under the GPL‑3.0 license.