sharebib

ShareBib

ShareBib is a self-hosted paper collection manager for BibTeX workflows, with a web app for teams, a Python SDK and CLI for automation, and agent skill support for AI-assisted paper management.

Use it to share collections with labmates, import and export .bib files, run scheduled arXiv crawlers, and manage papers programmatically from your shell, scripts, or AI agent.

Typical workflow

You curate papers in Zotero → right-click a collection → Export Collection → .bib → upload it here.

Your labmate opens the link you shared → exports the .bib → imports it into their own Zotero. Or use the sharebib CLI / agent skill to automate the same workflow.

Features

• Self-hosted, local login or OAuth
• Import and export .bib files (works with Zotero, etc.)
• Scheduled crawl tasks: auto-fetch new papers from arXiv RSS with keyword filtering (+required, -excluded, *wildcard)
• Duplication detection and merging
• Organize papers into collections with per-user access control
• Python SDK, sharebib CLI, and agent skill support for programmatic paper-management workflows
• i18n support (English, 中文)
• Desktop and mobile page layout

Tested authentication methods:

• Simple auth (username/password)
• OAuth with Authentik

Installation

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add visualdust/sharebib
/plugin install sharebib

Other AI Agents

Using vercel-labs/skills:

npx skills add visualdust/sharebib -a codex    # Codex
npx skills add visualdust/sharebib -a cursor   # Cursor
npx skills add visualdust/sharebib -a windsurf # Windsurf

Prerequisites

Install the ShareBib CLI tool required by the skill:

pip install sharebib

AI Agent Quick Start

1. Get Your API Key

1. Log in to your ShareBib instance.
2. Go to Settings.
3. In SDK API Keys, click Create API Key.
4. Copy the generated key (starts with pc_).

2. Configure Authentication

Set environment variables:

export SHAREBIB_API_KEY="pc_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
export SHAREBIB_BASE_URL="https://papers.example.com"
export SHAREBIB_TIMEOUT="30"

Or create .sharebib/config.json:

{
  "api_key": "pc_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "base_url": "https://papers.example.com",
  "timeout": 30
}

3. Use with Your AI Agent

Once installed, your AI agent can help with ShareBib workflows such as:

List my accessible collections in ShareBib
Create a private reading-list collection for systems papers
Find Gavin's ShareBib user account so I can share a collection
Export the BibTeX for collection 1234 to a file
Search papers for "transformer" and summarize the top results

Documentation

• skills/sharebib/SKILL.md - agent-facing skill instructions and command reference
• sdk/README.md - Python SDK and CLI usage
• AGENTS.md - repository-level agent instructions

Deploy with Docker

Quick start

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  sharebib:
    image: ghcr.io/visualdust/share-bib:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
    restart: unless-stopped

docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost (or your domain) and follow the setup wizard to create your admin account.

Production deployment

For production, it's recommended to set a custom JWT secret:

1. Copy the example files:

cp docker-compose.example.yml docker-compose.yml
cp .env.example .env

2. Generate and set a JWT secret in .env:

# Generate a secure secret
openssl rand -hex 32

# Add to .env
JWT_SECRET_KEY=your-generated-secret-here

3. Start the service:

docker compose up -d

OAuth authentication

To use OAuth (e.g., with Authentik, Keycloak, GitHub), add these environment variables: