RSSCat

RSSCat is an automatic torrent download and notifier.

Requirements

• MongoDB
• python-pymongo
• python-feedparser
• python-requests
• python-bittorrent
• python-configobj

On Ubuntu, just run

apt-get install mongodb-server mongodb-clients python-pymongo python-feedparser python-requests python-bittorrent python-configobj

RSSCat expects a MongoDB instance living on localhost. Installing the mongodb-server package achieves just that.

Developed / Tested on

• Ubuntu 12.04
• Ubuntu 13.04

Configuration

RSSCat can be configured in two way:

Configuration file

By default, RSSCat will look for a configuration file called rsscat.config in its root folder. If it finds one, it will load all options within. To use this, simply copy rsscat.config.default, and edit accordingly.

To instead use a configuration file in another location, specify the --config option with the config file's absolute path.

CLI options

Every option specified on the CLI will override its counterpart configuration file option. That is, if you set torrentdir=/some/dir, and also specify --torrentdir=/the/right/dir, RSSCat will use the /the/right/dir as the torrentdir.

Run RSSCat with the -h or --help option to see all available CLI options.

Basic operation

RSSCat has three distinct threads of execution:

1. It checks all configured RSS feeds for any new items, and stores them.
2. It checks if any of these new items have been processed before. If not, it will download the torrent file the specified torrentdir.
3. It checks if any recent processed items require a notification. This will only happen if a Pushover user key has been defined.

Defining new feeds

RSSCat will look in the feeds collection, in the rsscat database for any feed that is enabled. For now, defining new feeds has to be done manually. This example uses the mongo cli tool provided by the mongodb-clients package.

$ mongo
MongoDB shell version: 2.2.4
connecting to: test
> use rsscat
switched to db rsscat
> db.feeds.insert({ "name": "My Torrent RSS feed", "url": "http://some.torrent.host/feed.xml", "enabled": true })
> exit

This can be done while RSSCat is still running. After this, RSSCat will automatically pick up the new feed, download it, and determine what items need processing (usually all of them).

Avoiding duplicates

Because multiple RSS feeds can contain the same torrent files, RSSCat tries to avoid downloading duplicate torrent files.

• When downloading new torrent files, it compares its info hash with all info hashes already known to RSSCat. If it finds that it has already downloaded it, it will mark it as duplicate and skip it in future runs.
• If the info hash is not a duplicate, but a file already exists with the exact same filename, it will mark it as error, and also skip it in future runs.

More checks may be added in the future if the need arises.

License

RSSCat is licensed under the GPLv3 license.