seedboxtools 1.6.7

A tool to automate downloading finished torrents from a seedbox

Seedbox tools (seedboxtools)

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The seedbox tools will help you download all those Linux ISOs that you downloaded on your remote seedbox (whether it's a Transmission Web, or TorrentFlux-b4rt, or a PulsedMedia seedbox) 100% automatically, without any manual intervention on your part.

With this program installed on your home computer, all you need to do is simply start a torrent in your seedbox, from anywhere you are; then, when you get back home, all your downloads will be fully downloaded at home, ready to use and enjoy.

Tools included in this set

This package contains several tools:

1. leechtorrents: a tool that leeches finished downloads from a torrent seedbox to your local computer.
2. configleecher: a configuration wizard to set up the clients to work properly against your seedbox.
3. uploadtorrents: a tool that lets you queue up a torrent or magnet link for download on your seedbox.

What you need to have before using this package

• Python 3.7 on your local machine
• Python iniparse installed there
• Python requests installed there, version 0.11.1 or higher (with SSL support)
• a seedbox running TorrentFlux-b4rt or Transmission Web + API, or a PulsedMedia ruTorrent seedbox from PulsedMedia.com
• an SSH server on your seedbox
  • an SSH client on your local machine
  • a public key-authenticated user account in the seedbox, so that your user can log in without passwords and can read the torrents and downloads directories in the seedbox
  • rsync installed on both machines
  • if you are using TorrentFlux-b4rt on your seedbox:
    • the command torrentinfo-console from the BitTorrent package, installed on the seedbox
    • the command fluxcli installed and operational on the seedbox
  • if you are using Transmission on your seedbox:
    • the command transmission-remote from the Transmission package, installed on your local machine
    • the API server port open so that transmission-remote can query it
  • if you are using a PulsedMedia seedbox, you don't need to do anything

Installation

You will need to install this package on your local machine.

You can install this package directly from PyPI using pip::

pip install seedboxtools

If you are on an RPM-based distribution, build an RPM from the source package and install the resulting RPM::

make rpm

Otherwise, just use the standard Python installation system::

python -m build -s
pip install dist/*.tar.gz

You can also run it directly from the unpacked source directory::

export PYTHONPATH=src
bin/leechtorrents --help

Configuration

The tools require some configuration after installation. There is a nifty configuration wizard that will set the configuration file up. Run it and answer a few questions::

configleecher

The script will ask you for the necessary configuration values before you can run the tools here. You should run this wizard on the machine where you'll be running leechtorrents (see below).

Note: Both TorrentFlux and Transmission protect their download and torrent directories using permissions. You should become part of the UNIX group they use to protect those directories, and change the permissions accordingly so you have at least read and list permissions (rx).

Downloading finished torrents with the leecher tool

The leecher tool will contact your seedbox and ask for a listing of finished torrents, then download them locally to the directory you chose during configuration. There are various ways to run the script:

• manually on a terminal window
• with cron
• in a systemd unit file as a service

In all cases, the leecher tool will figure out finished torrents, download them to the download folder you configured during the configleecher stage, then create a file named .<downloaded file>.done within the download folder, to indicate that the torrent has finished downloading. This marker helps the leecher tool remember which torrents were fully downloaded, so that it doesn't attempt to download them yet again.

Manually

In your terminal program of choice, just run the command::

leechtorrents

There are various options you can supply to the program to change its behavior, such as enabling periodic checks and logging to a file. Run leechtorrents -h to see the options.

With cron

Put this in your crontab to run it every minute::

* * * * * leechtorrents -Dql

leechtorrents will daemonize itself, write to its default log file (which you could change with another command line option), and be quiet if no work needs to be done. Locking prevents multiple leechtorrents processes from running simultaneously.

With systemd

Enable the respective unit file for your user:

# $USER contains the user that will run leechtorrents.
# Only run this after configuring the torrent leecher!
sudo systemctl enable --now leechtorrents@$USER

You can configure command line options in /etc/default/leechtorrents as well as with ~/.config/leechtorrents-environment. The environment variable $LEECHTORRENTS_OPTS is defined in either of those files, and carries the command-line options that will be used by the program.

You can verify if there are any errors using:

sudo systemctl status leechtorrents@$USER
# and
sudo journalctl -b -u leechtorrents@$USER

Removing completed torrents once they have been fully downloaded

The leecher tool has the ability to remove completed downloads that aren't seeding from your seedbox. Just pass the command line option -r to the leecher tool leechtorrents, and it will automatically remove from the seedbox each torrent it successfully downloads, so long as the torrent is not seeding anymore. This feature helps conserve disk space in your seedbox. Note that, once a torrent has been removed from the seedbox, its corresponding .<downloaded file>.done file on the download folder will be eliminated, to clear up clutter in the download folder.

Example::

leechtorrents -r

Running a program after a torrent is finished downloading

The leecher tool has the capacity to run a program (non-interactively) right after a download is completed, and will also pass the full path to the file or directory that was downloaded to the program. This program will be run right after the download is done, and (if you have enabled said option) before the torrent is removed from the seedbox, and its marker file removed from the download folder.

To activate the running of the post-download program, pass the option -s followed by the path to the program you want to run.

Here is an example that runs a particular program to process downloads::

leechtorrents -s /usr/local/bin/blend-linux-distributions

In this example, right after your favorite Linux distribution torrent (which surely is Fedora-22.iso) is done and saved to your download folder /srv/seedbox, leechtorrents will execute the following command line::

/usr/local/bin/blend-linux-distributions /srv/seedbox/Fedora-22.iso

The standard output and standard error of the program are passed to the standard output and standard error of leechtorrents, which may be your terminal, a logging service, or the log file set aside for logging purposes by the leechtorrents command line parameter -l. Standard input will be nullified, so no option for interacting with the program will exist.

Note that your program will only ever execute once per downloaded torrent. Also note that the return value of your program will be ignored. Finally, please note that if your program doesn't finish, this will block further downloads, so make sure to equip your program with a timeout (perhaps using SIGALRM or such mechanisms).

If you want to run a shell or other language script against the downloaded file or directory, you are advised to write a script file and pass that as the argument to -s, then use the first argument to the script file as the path to the downloaded file (it's usually $1 in sh-like languages, like it is sys.argv[1] in Python).

How to upload torrents to your seedbox

The uploadtorrents command-line tool included in this package will upload the provided torrent files or magnet links to your seedbox::

uploadtorrents TORRENT [TORRENT ...]

This tool currently only supports PulsedMedia clients.