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:
- Python 3.5+ and a few Python packages that is available on PyPI.
- Root access is not required to install.
Near-zero configuration:
- magneticod works out of the box, and magneticow requires minimal configuration to work with the web server you choose.
- Detailed, step-by-step manual to guide you through the installation.
No reliance on any centralised entity:
- magneticod crawls 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.
High performance implementation:
- magneticod utilizes every bit of your bandwidth 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 dependent 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 peers 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 & removes the need for torrent websites.

Installation Instructions

WARNING:

magnetico is still under active construction, and is considered pre-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:

magnetico currently does NOT have any filtering system NOR it allows individual torrents to be removed from the database, and BitTorrent DHT network is full of the materials that are considered illegal in many countries (violence, pornography, copyright infringing content, and even child-pornography). If you are afraid of the legal consequences, or simply morally against (indirectly) assisting those content to spread around, follow the magneticow installation instructions carefully to password-protect the web-interface from others.

Install magneticod first by following its installation instruction.
Install magneticow first by following its installation instruction.

License

All the code is licensed under AGPLv3, unless otherwise stated in the source specific source. See COPYING file for the full license text.

Dedicated to Cemile Binay, in whose hands I thrived.

Bora M. ALPER <bora@boramalper.org>