transmission-rss on Turris Omnia in a Ubuntu Bionic lxc-container

After failing with other programs, I was able to deploy this one and it was even quite pleasant.

transmission-rss is basically a workaround for transmission's lack of the ability to monitor RSS feeds and automatically add enclosed torrent links.

It works with transmission-daemon and transmission-gtk (if the web frontend is enabled in the settings dialog). Sites like showrss.karmorra.info and ezrss.it or self-hosted seriesly instances are suited well as feed sources.

A tool called transmission-add-file is also included for mass adding of torrent files.

As it's done with poems, I devote this very artful and romantic piece of code to the single most delightful human being: Ann.

The minimum supported Ruby version is 2.1. (You will need rbenv if your os does not support Ruby >= 2.1, e.g. on Debian wheezy.)

Installation

lxc-start --name transfeed_lxc
lxc-attach --name transfeed_lxc
sudo apt install nano
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/paprikodlak/transmission-rss
cd transmission-rss
sudo apt-get install rubygems ruby-dev
bundle
gem build transmission-rss.gemspec
gem install transmission-rss-*.gem
nano /etc/transmission-rss.conf
crontab -e

Config

 
feeds:
  - url: https://showrss.info/user/xxx.rss?magnets=true&namespaces=true&name=clean&quality=fhd&re=yes
    seed_ratio_limit: 0

add_paused: false

server:
  host: 10.0.0.7
  port: 9091

Cron job

Add to first line:

MAILTO=""

Append at the end to run every 10 minutes:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -s >> /root/transmission-rss/log/cronLog 2>&1

Configuration

A yaml formatted config file is expected at /etc/transmission-rss.conf. Users can override some options for their transmission-rss instances by providing a config at ~/.config/transmission-rss/config.yml (or in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME instead of ~/.config).

WARNING: If you want to override a nested option like log.target you also have to explicitly specify the others like log.level. (True for categories server, login, log, privileges, and client.)

Minimal example

It should at least contain a list of feeds:

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
  - url: http://example.com/feed2

Feed item titles can be filtered by a regular expression:

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
    regexp: foo
  - url: http://example.com/feed2
    regexp: (foo|bar)

Feeds can also be configured to download files to specific directory:

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
    download_path: /home/user/Downloads

Setting the seed ratio limit is supported per feed:

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
    seed_ratio_limit: 0

Configurable certificate validation, good for self-signed certificates. Default is true:

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
    validate_cert: false

All available options

The following configuration file example contains every existing option (although update_interval, add_paused, server, log, fork, single, and pid_file are default values and could be omitted). The default log.target is STDERR. privileges is not defined by default, so the script runs as current user/group. login is also not defined by default. It has to be defined, if transmission is configured for HTTP basic authentication.

See ./transmission-rss.conf.example for more documentation.

feeds:
  - url: http://example.com/feed1
  - url: http://example.com/feed2
  - url: http://example.com/feed3
    regexp: match1
  - url: http://example.com/feed4
    regexp: (match1|match2)
  - url: http://example.com/feed5
    download_path: /home/user/Downloads
  - url: http://example.com/feed6
    seed_ratio_limit: 1
  - url: http://example.com/feed7
    regexp:
      - match1
      - match2
  - url: http://example.com/feed8
    regexp:
      - matcher: match1
        download_path: /home/user/match1
      - matcher: match2
        download_path: /home/user/match2
  - url: http://example.com/feed9
    validate_cert: false

update_interval: 600

add_paused: false

server:
  host: localhost
  port: 9091
  tls: false
  rpc_path: /transmission/rpc

login:
  username: transmission
  password: transmission

log:
  target: /var/log/transmissiond-rss.log
  level: debug

privileges:
  user: nobody
  group: nobody

client:
  timeout: 5

fork: false

single: false

pid_file: false

seen_file: ~/.config/transmission/seen

Daemonized Startup

As a systemd service

The following content can be saved into /etc/systemd/system/transmission-rss.service to create a systemd unit. Remember checking the path in ExecStart.

[Unit]
Description=Transmission RSS daemon.
After=network.target transmission-daemon.service

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -f
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The unit files are reloaded by systemctl daemon-reload. You can then start transmission-rss by running systemctl start transmission-rss. Starting on boot, can be enabled systemctl enable transmission-rss.

As a cronjob

transmission-rss can also be started in a single run mode, in which it runs a single loop and then exits. To do so, transmission-rss needs to be started with the -s flag. An example crontab line for running every 10 minutes can be:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/transmission-rss -s