qBittorrent Racing

qbit-race is a set of tools to help racing torrents on certain trackers. Some features are:

• Reannounce to tracker
• Automatically tag torrents with trackers
• Discord notifications on addition (w/ size, trackers)
• Discord notifications on completion (w/ ratio)
• Configuring the number of simultaneous races
• Pause seeding torrents when a new race is about to begin
• Skip torrents with certain tags / category from being paused prior to a race

This repository is still in beta. There might be bugs. Feel free to open an issue if you encounter one. You may also open an issue to request a feature, but please mark it with the prefix [FEATURE REQUEST]

Thanks

Massive Thanks to WalkerServers for sponsoring this project. Check them out for affordable, high performance dedicated servers!

Index

• qBittorrent Racing
  • Thanks
  • Index
  • Node requirement
    • Important!
  • Repo Setup
  • Updating
  • Additional Settings
    • Backup Settings
  • AutoDL setup (Basic)
  • AutoDL setup (Advanced)
    • Torrent Category
    • Change Category on torrent completion
  • Autobrr Setup
  • qBittorrent post race setup
  • Other Scripts
    • Tag Errored Torrents
  • Prometheus Exporter
    • Metrics server setup
    • Example PromQL queries

Node requirement

Please use Node.JS v18.6.0 or later. LTS v16 should work in most cases, but if you face bugs related to "Out of memory: wasm memory" (more info) , please try Node v18.6.0 before creating an issue.

I would recommend using n for installing Node.JS (https://github.com/tj/n) .

Important!

The node binary needs to be accessible to autodl-irssi (or autobrr) and qbittorrent. On some seedboxes, the PATH for these is fixed, and usually includes a directory such as ~/bin or ~/.local/bin. In such cases you can symlink node to these, more details are below.

You can determine the path to node by running:

$ which node

For instance, if you install using n, it may be /home/username/n/bin/node. Then, symlink that into your bin folder:

ln -s PATH_TO_NODE ${HOME}/bin/node

For details on specific seedbox vendors, see (TODO).

Usually on dedicates seedboxes, the path you install node to, even via n, should be added to the user's path, and restarting applications (e.g. autodl, qbittorrent) should make this available in their path.

However, if it isn't, then you usually need to symlink it into /usr/bin. First determine the path to node:

$ which node

For instance, if you install using n, it may be /home/username/n/bin/node. Then, symlink that into /usr/bin as (this may need sudo):

ln -s PATH_TO_NODE /usr/bin/node

For details on specific seedbox vendors, see (TODO).

Setup

PLEASE NOTE : YOU ARE ON THE MASTER BRANCH, FOR V2 (ALPHA) OF QBIT-RACE! THIS RELEASE IS NOT YET STABLE.

If you want to install the latest stable release, please checkout the README of v1.1.0: https://github.com/ckcr4lyf/qbit-race/tree/v1.1.0

If you want to try out V2 (alpha), then read ahead...

Install qbit-race

Installing is as simple as npm i -g qbit-race

Post install setup

Run qbit-race once to generate a dummy config file.

Then you can edit the file in ~/.config/qbit-race/config.json with the values you prefer.

Configuration

Once you've initialized the config, you can tweak settings in ~/.config/qbit-race/config.json. These settings can be changed anytime by modifying this file, and doing so does not need a restart of qBittorrent or AutoDL. Here is a short explanation of the options:

|Parameter|Default|Description| |---------|-------|-----------| |REANNOUNCE_INTERVAL|5000|milliseconds to wait before re-sending reannounce requests| |REANNOUNCE_LIMIT|30|Number of times to reannounce to the tracker before "giving up" (sometimes a torrent may be uploaded but then deleted by moderation)| |PAUSE_RATIO|1|When a new torrent is added, all seeding torrents above this ratio are paused. -1 will not pause any torrents. (This may lead to worse racing performance)| |PAUSE_SKIP_TAGS|["tracker.linux.org", "some_other_tag"]|Prevent pausing of torrents before a race, if any of the tags match. This parameter is useful for skipping certain trackers where you may want to maintain seedtime| |PAUSE_SKIP_CATEGORIES|["permaseeding", "some_other_category"]|Prevent pausing of torrents before a race, if the category matches any in this list. Useful if you setup autoDL with some filters with the category option, and want to skip them from being paused| |CONCURRENT_RACES|1|How many torrents can be "raced" at once. If autodl grabs a torrent, but these many races are already in progress, the torrent will be silently skipped. While less parallel races give better performance, if you want to download everything autoDL grabs, set this to -1| |COUNT_STALLED_DOWNLOADS|false|If a seeder abandons the torrent midway, the download may be stalled. This option controls whether such torrents should be counted when checking for CONCURRENT_RACES. It is advised to keep this as false| |QBITTORRENT_SETTINGS|object|The connection options for qBittorrent. More details below| |DISCORD_NOTIFICATIONS|object|Configuration for discord notifications. Check this section for more details| |CATEGORY_FINISH_CHANGE|object|Check this section for details|

Discord Notifications

This option allows you to configure a Discord Webhook URL for notifications on a torrent being added, as well as torrent completion.

|Parameter|Default|Description| |---------|-------|-----------| |enabled|false|Controls whether notifications are sent or not. Set to true to enable discord notifications| |webhook|""|The URL for your discord webhook| |botUsername|qBittorrent|The username of the Discord "account" that sends the notification| |botAvatar|(qBittorrent logo)|The picture of the Discord "account" that sends notification, and thumbnail of the embed|

Once you enable webhooks, you can run qbit-race validate to check if it is able to send you a message in the channel.

Change Category on torrent completion

Often it may be desirable to change the category of the torrent on completion, example when using with Sonarr / Radarr etc. It is also useful to move torrents from SSD to HDD, with qBittorrents category-based download path rules. You can add as many rules as you would like (of course, a single torrent is limited to a single category still, by qbittorrent itself).

To do so, there are two requirements:

1. The torrent must be added with a category set (see this section)
2. The category to be changed to must already exist in qBittorrent

Then, in the configuration file, you can add a line to the CATEGORY_FINISH_CHANGE object, of the form:

'THE_CATEGORY_FROM_AUTODL': 'THE_CATEGORY_AFTER_COMPLETION'

For instance, if you add it with the category "DOWNLOADING_LINUX", and want to change to "SEEDING_LINUX" on completeion, you can set it up as:

CATEGORY_FINISH_CHANGE: {
     'DOWNLOADING_LINUX': 'SEEDING_LINUX',
     'ANOTHER_ONE': 'YET_ANOTHER_ONE'
}

AutoDL setup (Basic)

Make sure you followed the steps to symlink node (if required). Detailed vendor-specific seedbox guides can be found here: (TODO)

To determine the path of qbit-race, run which qbit-race. You will see the complete path, for example /home/username/n/bin/qbit-race. This will be the command in the AutoDL config.

Now in AutoDL, change the Action for your filter (or Global action) to:

1. Choose .torrent action - Run Program
2. Comamnd - /home/username/n/bin/qbit-race
3. Arguments - add -p "$(TorrentPathName)"

TODO: Screencap

Click OK, and that should be it!

Now, when AutoDL gets a torrent, it will pass it to the script which will feed it to qBittorrent!

You can view the logs under ~/.config/qbit-race/logs.txt to try and debug.

AutoDL setup (Advanced)

TODO: UPDATE FOR V2

These are additional parameters you can specify in autoDL for additional functionality

No Tracker Tags

By default, when adding the torrent, qbit-race also "tags" the torrent with the hostname of all trackers. This is mostly useful in older version of qBittorrent to be able to sort torrents by trackers.

To disable this, you can pass an extra flag --no-tracker-tags to the qbit-race add command.

qbit-race add -p "$(TorrentPathName) --no-tracker-tags"

Extra tags

If you want to add extra tags to the torrent, you can supply them via a comma-separated list using the --extra-tags param to the qbit-race add command.

qbit-race add -p "$(TorrentPathName) --extra-tags "linux,foss"

Torrent Category

In the autoDL arguments field, you may specify a category (per filter, or global) by adding to the end of arguments --category "the category name"

For instance, a filter for Arch Linux ISOs could have the arguments:

`"$(InfoHash)" "$(InfoName)" "$(Tracker)" "$(TorrentPathName)" --category "never open"`

Which would set the category of all torrents that match said filter to "never open". If the category doesn't exist it will be created automatically.

Protip: qBittorrent has a feature that allows you to configure download paths by category. This might be useful to consolidate your downloads.

autobrr setup (BETA)

TODO: UPDATE FOR V2

It should work with autobrr as well, for the arguments in autobrr, just put {{ .TorrentPathName }} , and the command to execute same as that for AutoDL (path to qbit-race). Advanced instructions for category etc. are similar.

qBittorrent post race setup

TODO: UPDATE FOR V2

After the race, the post race script will resume the torrents (if nothing else is downloading), and also send you a discord notification with the ratio (if you have enabled it).

To get the path to the post race script, run the following commands:

cd ~/scripts/qbit-race/bin
echo "$(pwd)/post_race.mjs"

You will see a line like

/home/username/scripts/qbit-race/bin/post_race.mjs

This is the path to the script. Now open qBittorrent, and in that open settings. At the bottom of "Downloads", check "Run external program on torrent completion". In the textbox, enter that path to the script followed by "%I" "%N" "%T".

So the final entry would look like

/home/username/scripts/qbit-race/bin/post_race.js "%I" "%N" "%T"

Other Scripts

Tag Errored Torrents

TODO: UPDATE FOR V2

Sometimes torrents may be deleted from the tracker, or just an error in general. qBittorrent provides no easy way of sorting by these errors (Usually tracker responds with an error message).

To tag all such torrents as error, from the root folder (~/qbit-race), run:

npm run tag_unreg

This will tag all torrents which do not have ANY working tracker.

Prometheus Exporter

qbit-race now also features a prometheus exporter, which is a lightweight http server (based on fastify) which exports a few stats in a prometheus friendly format.

The stats exposed are:

• Download this session (bytes)
• Download rate (instant) (bytes/s)
• Upload this session (bytes)
• Upload rate (instant) (bytes/s)

Metrics server setup

In the config file, there are two keys under PROMETHEUS_SETTINGS to configure for where the server binds to, ip and port. Defaults are 127.0.0.1 and 9999 respectively.

This address needs to be accessible by yur prometheus instance!

To run the server, it is recommended to use a node process manager, pm2. Install it with:

npm i -g pm2

Then you can start the server (from the project root) with:

pm2 start "qbit-race metrics" --name=qbit-race-prom-exporter

(Replace name with something else if you wish)

You can monitor the status of th emetrics server with

pm2 monit

Then add it to your Prometheus config, and should be good to go!

Example PromQL queries

TODO