🧯 qbit-ops

🧯 A tiny qBittorrent CLI and TUI for people who don't want to nuke their seedbox by accident.

Inspect, diagnose and automate qBittorrent at a scale too big to manage by hand - and see exactly what a change will touch before it touches anything.

✨ Featured in Self-Host Weekly by selfh.st.

A live transfer, a filter, and a bulk pause shown before it is applied - then abandoned. Nothing moved.

🚀 Get started

Requires Python 3.12+ and a qBittorrent instance with the Web UI enabled.

🐍 From PyPI

Recommended, with uv:

uv tool install qbit-ops

Or with pipx:

pipx install qbit-ops

With the optional TUI:

uv tool install "qbit-ops[tui]"
pipx install "qbit-ops[tui]"

With the experimental MCP server, to talk to your library through an agent:

uv tool install "qbit-ops[mcp]"
pipx install "qbit-ops[mcp]"

📥 With the install script

For a machine with none of the above yet - no uv, pipx, Homebrew or Docker, and no Python either. It installs uv, which brings its own Python when the system has none recent enough.

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LECOQQ/qbit-ops/v0.6.0/scripts/install.sh | sh # x-release-please-version

A checksum is published beside the script, if you would rather read it before running it:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LECOQQ/qbit-ops/v0.6.0/scripts/install.sh.sha256 # x-release-please-version

🍺 With Homebrew

brew install LECOQQ/qbit-ops/qbit-ops

The tap ships the TUI, so there is no extra to pick. Upgrades follow the usual brew upgrade qbit-ops.

🐳 With Docker

Runs the same CLI on amd64 and arm64, with nothing installed on the host:

docker run --rm -it \
  -e QBIT_HOST -e QBIT_USER -e QBIT_PASSWORD \
  ghcr.io/lecoqq/qbit-ops:latest status

The TUI needs a TTY, which -it already gives you:

docker run --rm -it \
  -e QBIT_HOST -e QBIT_USER -e QBIT_PASSWORD \
  ghcr.io/lecoqq/qbit-ops:latest tui

For a long-lived setup, see the Compose example.

⌨️ Then turn on completion

qbit-ops --install-completion

For bash, zsh, fish or PowerShell. Commands, options, and the options whose values are a fixed set all complete; an upgrade needs no reinstall. Your own categories, tags and tracker hosts complete too, from a cache that fills as you use the tool.

⬆️ Upgrading

uv tool upgrade qbit-ops
pipx upgrade qbit-ops
brew upgrade qbit-ops

The install script above installs through uv tool install, so uv tool upgrade qbit-ops upgrades it too. To remove what it installed:

uv tool uninstall qbit-ops

🔌 Connecting

qbit-ops init

It asks for the host, user and password, tests them before writing, and saves to ~/.config/qbit-ops/.env with mode 0600. qbit-ops tui opens the same form when nothing is configured yet, and ctrl+o reopens it later to point at a different instance without restarting.

Where there is no terminal - a script, a container - set the three variables instead, and skip init entirely:

QBIT_HOST=http://192.168.1.10:8080
QBIT_USER=admin
QBIT_PASSWORD=…

Pointing at several instances is one variable: QBIT_OPS_ENV_FILE=~/.config/qbit-ops/seedbox.env takes precedence over a project-local .env, which takes precedence over the user file.

Then:

qbit-ops status
qbit-ops doctor
qbit-ops tui

🎸 Greatest hits

🧹 Reclaiming space

Reclaim disk without touching what matters.

qbit-ops torrents delete --ratio-min 2 --seeded-for 90d --exclude-tag keep

scanned   2418
matched   407
status    PREVIEW (dry-run)

Nothing is deleted: review it, add --no-dry-run, and that exact selection is what will run.

Know what your library actually weighs.

qbit-ops torrents stats
qbit-ops torrents stats --category sonarr

Size, transfer and seeding time over exactly the torrents you filter for. How qBittorrent's all-time counters are handled is in docs/COMMANDS.md.

🩺 Finding out what hurts

Find out which tracker is hurting you.

qbit-ops trackers status
qbit-ops explain tracker --tracker tracker.example

One line per tracker, health aggregated across every torrent that announces to it, and then the reasoning behind the verdict.

Act on every torrent stuck behind a dead tracker.

qbit-ops torrents list --tracker-health critical
qbit-ops torrents pause --tracker-health critical --no-dry-run

Selects on each torrent's own trackers, and gives the same verdict explain torrent does - it is the same computation. How a torrent with mixed tracker health is scored, and why a non-answer never matches, is in docs/COMMANDS.md.

See what each tracker is actually carrying.

qbit-ops trackers list
qbit-ops trackers list --category sonarr

Torrents, size, transferred bytes, ratio and seeding time per tracker, plus EXCL - the torrents that tracker is the only home of, which is the real answer to "what would I lose by leaving?". The columns deliberately do not sum to your library total; the reason is in docs/COMMANDS.md.

🔀 Surviving a tracker that moved, or died

Four commands, one shape: name the tracker, preview what it would touch, then apply. Each one walks your whole library so you never have to open a torrent to fix it.

Rotate a leaked passkey everywhere at once.

qbit-ops trackers replace-passkey \
  --tracker "https://tracker.example/announce/{passkey}"

{passkey} marks where the secret sits in the URL - you type those nine characters, never a passkey. It asks for the new one at a hidden prompt.

To drive it from a script, pipe the value in instead, and add --yes alongside --no-dry-run: stdin is then busy carrying the passkey, so the confirmation cannot read your answer there too.

pass show tracker/passkey | qbit-ops trackers replace-passkey \
  --tracker "https://tracker.example/announce/{passkey}" \
  --new-passkey-stdin --no-dry-run --yes

Follow a tracker that changed address.

qbit-ops trackers replace \
  --source "old.example" \
  --target "https://new.example/announce/{passkey}"

--source takes a bare host: identifying a tracker was never what a passkey was for. --target needs the placeholder, because a tracker this tool has never seen cannot have its passkey position guessed.

Keep a dying tracker while you move off it.

qbit-ops trackers add-if-present \
  --source "dying.example" \
  --target "https://backup.example/announce"

Adds the second tracker next to the first, on the torrents that carry the first and only those. Both announce, so nothing stops seeding while the old host makes up its mind. Torrent filters narrow the scan further if you only want part of the library.

Retire a tracker for good.

qbit-ops trackers remove --tracker "dead.example"

Drops it from every torrent that still lists it.

🔎 Finding it, and unsticking it

Find a torrent without remembering its exact name.

qbit-ops torrents search "iso ubunutu desktp"       # typos, word order
qbit-ops torrents pause --hash 3f2a1b               # copy the hash, then act

Ranked, tolerant, and read-only by construction: a search result is never a mutation target. Accents and case are folded before anything is compared. --name-contains/--name-regex stay the exact, deterministic option for that.

Unstick a queue that stopped moving.

qbit-ops torrents list --stalled
qbit-ops torrents reannounce --stalled --no-dry-run

🛡️ Safety by default

• 🧪 Dry-run first. Nothing changes unless --no-dry-run is explicit.
• 🎯 Hash-based targeting. Mutations never guess from a fuzzy torrent name.
• 🧊 Frozen plans. The previewed selection is the selection that gets applied.
• 🚫 No silent “all”. Bulk actions require a hash, --all, or an explicit filter.
• ❔ Unknown is never a match. A value qBittorrent didn't report never widens a selection.
• 🔒 Secret-safe output. Tracker passkeys and announce URLs stay redacted in normal output.
• ✅ Honest results. qbit-ops reports what was submitted or observed, not what it cannot prove.

🎯 Target exactly what you mean

Filters compose - repeat one for or, mix different ones for and, exclude with --exclude-* - and it's the same grammar whether you're listing or mutating, on the command line or in the TUI.

Full field reference in docs/COMMANDS.md.

🔍 Watch, explain, script

qbit-ops status --watch
qbit-ops explain torrent --hash abc123

explain answers why a torrent or tracker is in the state it is, from observed evidence - never a guess.

Read commands support machine-friendly output where it makes sense:

qbit-ops torrents list --format json
qbit-ops torrents stats --format json
qbit-ops status --format jsonl

🧭 How is qbit-ops different?

qbit-ops is deliberately not a daemon or background rules engine: select precisely, inspect the scope, preview the plan, then apply it.

See PHILOSOPHY.md for the reasoning behind that design.

🖥️ TUI

The optional Textual interface provides an operational overview, torrent browsing, filters, details, explanations, and previewed low-risk bulk actions.

The overview answers "what is this machine doing" without reading a number: a live trace of transfer in both directions, per-tracker activity, and the instance's own counters.

qbit-ops tui

Filters use the same grammar as the CLI, but as a draft: set them across four panes - Organisation, State, Measures, Trackers - and nothing moves until you hit Apply, with the footer keeping count of what's pending, what's invalid, and what actually landed.

Overview	Torrents

Search	Filters

Details	Preview before Apply

Press ? inside the TUI to see the available controls.

🤖 Agent-ready (experimental)

An MCP server exposes a read-only, bounded view of your library, so an agent can explore it conversationally:

"What's the state of my library?" -> "Which torrents look stalled?" -> "Why is this one stalled?"

uv tool install "qbit-ops[mcp]"

Then point an MCP host at the stdio entry point - for Claude Desktop, in its config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "qbit-ops": {
      "command": "qbit-ops-mcp"
    }
  }
}

It reads the same configuration the CLI does, so if qbit-ops status works, this works.

Five tools, no mutation. Start broad with library_summary, narrow with find_torrents or total a selection with aggregate_stats, then settle on one torrent with inspect_torrent or explain_torrent -- nothing that pauses, deletes or edits anything. Answers stay small whatever the library size, so a large one is explored by drilling down rather than dumped whole.

Experimental and personal. This is a spike, not a supported surface: it may be extended, or removed. See docs/MCP.md.

🧩 Compatibility

Container integration is tested against a fixed set of exact qBittorrent releases - evidence for those versions, never a claim for a range. The matrix is in docs/COMPATIBILITY.md.

Run qbit-ops doctor to compare your instance with the packaged evidence.

🧰 Commands

qbit-ops --help
qbit-ops --version
qbit-ops version
qbit-ops torrents --help
qbit-ops trackers --help

A compact command overview is available in docs/COMMANDS.md.

🗺️ Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for where the project is heading.

🧑‍💻 Development

git clone https://github.com/LECOQQ/qbit-ops.git
cd qbit-ops
make install
make check-fast
make check

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

📄 License

MIT - see LICENSE.