Help me design my torrent management system.

January 26, 2008 7:04 PM

I'm looking for tips, tricks, hacks, scripts, and ideas for managing torrents using Linux.

Here's what I would like to be able to do:

• Automated unpacking. If a torrent contained a zip, rar, etc it should be unpacked automatically.
• Automated move on completion. Move music, television, and movies to their appropriate folders. This can probably be done by looking at file type and size.
• Continued sharing after a file is moved. Is this even possible? I use some torrent sites that require share ratios, plus I want to be a good file sharer and give back. What if the files are further organized by Amarok?
• Remote downloading. I want to be able to go to download a torrent from anywhere. I've already got Apache and PHP setup.
• Other cool things. I want to do as little hands on torrent management as possible. Are there scripts that automatically download things with high scores on MetaCritic, Pitchfork, etc? Can I setup a script to automatically download new episodes of a show when they get hosted? I want to know about them!

I think most of this can be done using shell scripts and CRON jobs, but I figured there may already be existing tools.

posted by christonabike to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Can I setup a script to automatically download new episodes of a show when they get hosted?

If your client supports it and the tracker supports it, RSS does this, where you subscribe to a feed with keywords (e.g., 'Dexter') and your client will automatically add torrents on supporting trackers with the keyword included (e.g., Dexter.S1E10.HDTV.blahblah).
posted by tdischino at 7:27 PM on January 26, 2008

rtorrent can do some of this. I'm pretty curious to see what else people come up with.
posted by evariste at 7:30 PM on January 26, 2008

and crap if I didn't click Post too soon...the client you use will most likely do the first three bullet points. I'm using uTorrent, it will launch an app upon completion of the download (to extract), it will move completed downloads to a specific folder, and will continue to seed till the share is met.

The only part i'm not sure about is moving files to file-specific folders, a la movies to \Movie\, Tv Episodes to \TV\, MP3s to \Music\ and so on. I think this would take some scripting.

If you are using Azureus, it probably has plugins to do most of this.
posted by tdischino at 7:33 PM on January 26, 2008

Response by poster: I'm currently using Azureus, but I don't think it's that great. I'm fine with switching what software I use. Also, to make this clear: I'm fine with extremely complex solutions. I look at getting all of this setup as a fun project. Getting it done as fast as I can isn't my first priority.
posted by christonabike at 7:48 PM on January 26, 2008

With Apache and PHP, you may want to look into Torrentflux. It doesn't do many of the automated things you mention, but could conceivably be modified to do them.
posted by migurski at 8:14 PM on January 26, 2008

I use bitflu. While it does not do any of the things you want to automate, it does the one i think will be hardest for you to setup - It will keep sharing your files even if you move them, up to a specified ratio, at which time it will stop the torrent. Naturally, sharing after moving means at times there will be 2 copies of the torrent data on your system, but one will be automatically deleted once it is shared.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 4:41 AM on January 27, 2008

uTorrent allows you to tag your torrents with certain labels, and then append the label name to the directory name in the post-download move command. For example, you could have a label "ISOs" or "Movies" and it would end up moving the torrents to "Torrent Downloads/ISOs/".

I'll betcha ten bucks that other clients can do this or have plugins to do it.
posted by yellowbkpk at 6:04 AM on January 27, 2008

rtorrent as mentioned above can be extended to do almost all of what you want but it'll require some hacking. My current setup watches a drop directory, does (primitive) RSS scraping, seeding-until-ratio, and I had it doing on-completion moving but that got annoying because it would invariably move it just as I was starting to watch it.

If I were to automate it more fully I'd set it up to finish and move after a ratio and write a quick ruby script to scan that folder for regex matches and move them to a specific final place. There's no real web interface to rtorrent but there is XML-RPC which you could extend to a web interface pretty trivially. I started to do just that but then I realized that I've pretty much always got an SSH terminal. Oh and I run rtorrent in screen.
posted by Skorgu at 8:34 AM on January 27, 2008