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magnetico

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

Go CodeQL Go Report Card codecov

Flow of Operations

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

  • a crawler for the BitTorrent DHT network, which discovers info hashes and fetches metadata from the peers.
  • a lightweight web interface for searching and browsing the torrents discovered by its counterpart.

This 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!

Easy Run and Compilation

The easiest way to run magnetico is to use the OCI image built within the CI pipeline:

  • docker pull ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest
  • docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --help
  • docker run --rm -it -v <your_data_dir>:/data -p 8080:8080/tcp ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --database=sqlite3:///data/magnetico.sqlite3
  • visit http://localhost:8080

To compile using the standard Golang toolchain:

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, scalable database with advanced features for complex applications and high concurrency. SQLite is lightweight and easy to embed, ideal for simpler or smaller-scale applications. You might prefer PostgreSQL if you need scalability, advanced features, and robust concurrency management.

The installation of PostgreSQL varies depending on the OS and the final configuration you want to achieve. After setting it up, you should create a user, set a password, create a database owned by that user, and load the pg_trgm extension.

  • CREATE USER magnetico WITH PASSWORD 'magnetico';
  • CREATE DATABASE magnetico OWNER magnetico;
  • \c magnetico
  • CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
  • docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --help
  • docker run --rm -it -p 8080:8080/tcp ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --database=postgres://magnetico:magnetico@localhost:5432/magnetico?sslmode=disable
  • visit http://localhost:8080

CockroachDB

CockroachDB is ideal for situations when horizontal scalability, high availability, and global distribution is required. It currently does not support the pg_trgm extension, which provides functions for trigram-based similarity searching.

  • create a user and it's database
  • download the TLS certificate of your cluster
  • docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --help
  • docker run --rm -it -v <your_cert_dir>:/data -p 8080:8080/tcp ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --database=cockroach://magneticouser:[email protected]:26257/magnetico?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/data/cc-ca.crt
  • visit http://localhost:8080

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ is a high-performance messaging library that provides a set of tools for communication between distributed applications. The integration is designed in the persistence layer as a ZMQ PUB firehose, and works under the zeromq and zmq URL schemas.

  • docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest --help
  • docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/tgragnato/magnetico:latest -d --database=zeromq://localhost:5555

Features

Easy installation & minimal requirements:

  • Easy to build golang static binaries.
  • Root access is not required to install or to use.

magnetico trawls the BitTorrent DHT by "going" from one node to another, and fetches the metadata using the nodes without using trackers. No reliance on any centralised entity!

Unlike client-server model that web applications use, P2P networks are chaotic and magnetico is designed to handle all the operational errors accordingly.

High performance implementation in Go: magnetico utilizes every bit of your resources to discover as many infohashes & metadata as possible.

magnetico features a lightweight web interface to help you access the database without getting on your way.

If you'd like to password-protect the access to magnetico, you need to store the credentials in file. The credentials file must consist of lines of the following format: <USERNAME>:<BCRYPT HASH>.

  • <USERNAME> must start with a small-case ([a-z]) ASCII character, might contain non-consecutive underscores except at the end, and consists of small-case a-z characters and digits 0-9.
  • <BCRYPT HASH> is the output of the well-known bcrypt function.

You can use htpasswd (part of apache2-utils on Ubuntu) to create lines:

$  htpasswd -bnBC 12 "USERNAME" "PASSWORD"
USERNAME:$2y$12$YE01LZ8jrbQbx6c0s2hdZO71dSjn2p/O9XsYJpz.5968yCysUgiaG

Screenshots

The Homepage Searching for torrents Search result
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.