Open Library

Open Library is an open-source library management system that I develop and maintain as a Django monolith. It covers the day-to-day work of a small library: cataloguing books by category and publisher, managing members and their library cards, and recording borrowing and returns. The project started in 2021 and was brought up to date in 2026 on Django 5.2 LTS and Python 3.12. Staff work from a signed-in dashboard with Highcharts statistics, a global search across books, members and publishers, and autocomplete when creating borrow records. Access is split between administrators and staff: group-based permissions gate the activity log, CSV data export and the JSON API built with Django REST Framework, while employee accounts and notices are reserved for superusers. The application runs in Docker behind Caddy with automatic HTTPS on DigitalOcean, backed by PostgreSQL 16 in an isolated schema and served with Gunicorn and WhiteNoise. GitHub Actions runs Django system checks, migrations and the test suite against PostgreSQL 16 on every push and pull request. A public demo with seeded sample data is available.