magnetico

Autonomous (self-hosted) BitTorrent DHT search engine suite.

magnetico is the first autonomous (self-hosted) BitTorrent DHT search engine suite that is designed for end-users. The suite consists of two packages:

• magneticod: Autonomous BitTorrent DHT crawler and metadata fetcher.
• magneticow: Lightweight web interface for magnetico.

Both programs, combined together, allows anyone with a decent Internet connection to access the vast amount of torrents waiting to be discovered within the BitTorrent DHT space, without relying on any central entity.

magnetico liberates BitTorrent from the yoke of centralised trackers & web-sites and makes it truly decentralised. Finally!

Features

• Easy installation & minimal requirements:
  • Pre-compiled static binaries and Docker images are provided.
  • Root access is not required to install or to use.
• Near-zero configuration:
  • Both programs work out of the box, and magneticow can be used without a web-server too.
  • Detailed, step-by-step manual to guide you through the installation.
• No reliance on any centralised entity:
  • magneticod trawls the BitTorrent DHT by "going" from one node to another, and fetches the metadata using the nodes without using trackers.
• Resilience:
  • Unlike client-server model that web applications use, P2P networks are chaotic and magneticod is designed to handle all the operational errors accordingly.
    • Currently on paper, wait for the v1.0!
• High performance implementation in Go:
  • magneticod utilizes every bit of your resources to discover as many infohashes & metadata as possible.
• Built-in lightweight web interface:
  • magneticow features a lightweight web interface to help you access the database without getting on your way.

Screenshots

Click on the images to view full-screen.

The Homepage	Searching for torrents	Viewing the metadata of a torrent

Why?

BitTorrent, being a distributed P2P file sharing protocol, has long suffered because of the centralised entities that people depended on for searching torrents (websites) and for discovering other peers (trackers). Introduction of DHT (distributed hash table) eliminated the need for trackers, allowing peers to discover each other through other peers and to fetch metadata from the leechers & seeders in the network. magnetico is the finishing move that allows users to search for torrents in the network, hence removing the need for centralised torrent websites.

Installation Instructions

WARNING:

magnetico is still under active construction, and is considered alpha software. Please use magnetico suite with care and follow the installation instructions carefully to install it & secure the installation. Feel perfectly free to send bug reports, suggestions, or whatever comes to your mind to send to us through GitHub or personal e-mail.

WARNING:

Do NOT clone the repository to install magnetico, as it is never meant to be stable (except releases of course).

1. Install magneticod first by following its installation instructions.
2. Install magneticow afterwards by following its installation instructions.

Docker

Run magneticod and magneticow with:

make docker

It will run magnetico from already built image on Docker Hub!

You should access magneticow at http://localhost:8080.

To build fresh images from source, first run:

make image

Then run make docker. It ensures you run updated images of magnetico.

License

All the code is licensed under AGPLv3, unless stated otherwise specifically. See COPYING for details.

Donations

Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/boramalper

PayPal

https://paypal.me/boramalper

Cryptocurrencies (Coinbase)

• BTC: 3BLWjamWug3QQzcDDGwYLwuCqJyjcfYJB8
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• BCH: qqn07a58hax9l8pckq9j8ys6dsh2cnu4rsyztw2kj9
• ETH: 0xe5A8e80bAA6129DF7eBB1B5302F9e2Ef4C6f6E62
• ETC: 0x8964EcC86eaf043Bff2CdfE875E73D8095c26a58

Dedicated to Cemile Binay, in whose hands I thrived.

Bora M. ALPER bora@boramalper.org