Novask Torrent Search

A Python3, Flask-based torrent search engine based on qBittorrent's.

Important security/legal notes

Search plugins may allow to download content that is illegal in some countries. Novask's developers and contributors discourage this and take absolutely no responsibility for what you do with this program.

Novask allows to download torrents without having to go through the original websites' advertisements, etc. This may infringe their terms of service. It is your responsibility not to use any search plugins that may cause complaints, etc.

Novask has not been tested for security. As of now, if somebody gets access to your Novask instance, they could easily run a DoS attack on your server as simply as spawning a little too many search jobs. Also, search plugins may not be safe: always read their source code before using them.

You may want to create a separate, restricted user for Novask and use some process management techniques such as process groups to limit such vulnerabilities.

If you install Novask on a publicly accessible web server, always make sure it's password protected so that only you can use it.

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Testing
• Deploying

Usage

Simply go to Novask's home page and start a search, just like you would on qBittorrent.

Search may take a few minutes, so be patient while results are loaded.

Notice that when a search is started, the URL changes to something like /search/?uuid=<stuff>. Search results are stored in the database, so you can get the results of a previous search using that URL.

Beware that search results paging is done client-side. The resulting page may be too heavy for older computer and smartphones. Chrome on Android is known to hang when there are too many results. Firefox works quite well, though.

Testing

Make sure SQLite3 is installed

sudo apt install sqlite3

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Depaulicious/Novask
cd Novask
git submodule update

Install Novask in development mode

You may need to run pip3 as root, or use just pip. Note that Python2 should work but is not supported.

pip3 install -e .

Create the search engines directory

mkdir -p instance/engines

Download search plugins

Put them in instance/engines.

Note that Nova6 (the back-end) should support both Python2 and Python3 plugins out-of-the-box; however, if there are both Python2 and 3 versions, use the one that matches the version of the interpreter you're planning to run this in.

Some common sources:

• https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/tree/master/nova3/engines
• https://github.com/qbittorrent/search-plugins/wiki/Unofficial-search-plugins

Create testing database

By default, Novask uses an SQLite database at /tmp/test.db.

Create it:

python3 -c "from novask.database import db; db.create_all()"

Run the development server

export FLASK_APP=novask
export FLASK_DEBUG=true
flask run

You should be able to test Novask at localhost:5000.

Deploying

• On Apache