torrentwatch-xa

torrentwatch-xa is an anime/manga/light novel/TV show broadcatcher that regularly monitors multiple subscribed public RSS/Atom feeds for the latest "Favorite" serialized torrents and downloads them automatically. It is an actively-developed, high-quality resurrection of the popular but long-abandoned TorrentWatch-X.

As a fork of TorrentWatch-X, torrentwatch-xa handles Western live-action show titles containing commonly-used season x episode or date-based numbering styles. It is specially designed to also handle the widely-varying numbering styles used by anime, manga, and light novel fansubbing crews and also features all the bugfixes and code cleanup that TorrentWatch-X so badly needed.

To auto-download Favorite torrents, torrentwatch-xa controls a local or remote Transmission BitTorrent client via Transmission RPC and/or saves .torrent files or magnet links as files locally. The latter allows the use of any BitTorrent client (not just Transmission) that can watch directories for .torrent files or magnet links to automatically start those torrents.

torrentwatch-xa runs on an Apache 2.4.x webserver with PHP 5.6.0alpha3¹ or higher and the prerequisite PHP packages listed in the installation instructions. It works out-of-the-box on any up-to-date instance of Debian 8.x, Ubuntu 14.04/16.04/18.04.x on any architecture, and it can be made to work on current versions of RedHat, Fedora, or CentOS LINUX by installing the RPM package equivalents of the prerequisite PHP .deb packages and adjusting the firewall and SELINUX restrictions. RedHat distros are not officially supported at this time.

torrentwatch-xa is extremely lightweight and can run decently on even a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero². The web UI works on any modern web browser that has Javascript enabled, including smartphone and tablet browsers.

Common setups:

• Local: torrentwatch-xa and Transmission run together on the same LINUX desktop, server, or NAS; downloaded content is stored on this one device. The ODROID HC1 or HC2 with a large capacity SATA drive is perfect for this use case--quiet, fast, and easy to directly install torrentwatch-xa and transmission-daemon on.
• Remote: torrentwatch-xa runs on a low-power computer (usually a home-theater single-board computer running Kodi) or virtual machine and remotely controls Transmission running on a separate NAS that stores the downloaded content.

¹ PHP 5.6.0alpha3 is really only required by PHPMailer's SMTP 5.2.23 library to support TLS 1.1 and 1.2. torrentwatch-xa itself only requires PHP 5.4.0. If you are not using email triggers with TLS 1.1 or 1.2, you should be able to avoid this version requirement by downgrading PHPMailer's SMTP library.

² It takes around 18 seconds for the web UI to process all six default feeds with 32 favorites, as compared to around 5 seconds on an ODROID C1+.

Status

I've posted 1.2.0 with the changes listed in CHANGELOG.md.

1.2.0 can detect a torrent hash in the URL and use it if it cannot retrieve a torrent file. This ability can get around DDoS blockers like CloudFlare if the URL happens to contain the hash. (Thanks to efelon on GitHub for reporting this issue.)

To obviate Ubuntu 18.04's PrivateTmp feature, the twxalog file has been moved to /var/log/txwalog. If you use logrotate to rotate twxalog, remember to use this new path.

I'll be dropping support for Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 8.x soon (PHP 5.6) soon. They should still work, but I won't be testing on those OSes further.

Still in Alpha

• a Favorite Filter can now match multibyte strings (Japanese/Chinese/Korean) in RegEx matching mode only (not Simple, nor Glob), but multibyte characters must be individually specified in PCRE Unicode hexadecimal notation like 0x{3010} to satisfy PHP's preg_ functions.
• Fedora Server 25 is being tested and works fine but will not be officially supported for quite a while.

Any Torrent Atom Feeds Out There?

I'd like to finally test and bugfix the Atom feed capability of torrentwatch-xa. If anyone knows of a public Atom feed that contains torrents, please message me at dchang0 at Github or open an Issue. If it's got anime torrents, even better, as I can include it as a default feed. Thanks!

Documentation

See:

• INSTALL.md for detailed installation steps or important notes if you are upgrading from a prior version.

• USAGE.md for usage notes and an explanation of some design decisions.

• TROUBLESHOOTING.md for detailed troubleshooting steps and explanations of design decisions and common issues.

• Known bugs are tracked primarily in the TODO.md and CHANGELOG.md files. Tickets in GitHub Issues will remain separate for accountability reasons.

Credits

• Original TorrentWatch-X by Joris Vandalon https://code.google.com/p/torrentwatch-x/
• Original Torrentwatch by Erik Bernhardson https://code.google.com/p/torrentwatch/
• Credits for the few third-party PHP and Javascript libraries are inside of their respective files.