Making Sonarr work with Tixati

My very own dotfiles ✨

Making Sonarr work with Tixati

Sonarr is a wonderful tool to track TV series, but making it work with Tixati has several gotchas. This is a rough guide through the setup process.

Sonarr installation

Install Sonarr following the guide. I suggest making it a service too.

Sonarr setup

Indexer(s)

This is where it starts to get tricky. Go to Settings > Indexers and add your preferred method. Don’t worry if it yields only magnet links.

Download client

In Settings > Download Client add a new one, selecting “Torrent Blackhole”. Set the torrent folder to the folder Tixati is tracking, and the watch folder to the folder where Tixati will put finished torrents. Set “Save magnet files” to Yes and save.

While you are at this section, be sure “Completed Download Handling” is enabled.

Tixati installation

Just use the fantastic bundle that comes with these dotfiles :sunglasses:

Tixati setup

  • In Settings > Transfers > Meta info set it to open .torrent files created/moved in a folder you specify (e.g. ~/.sonarr/). Check the “Load magnet URLs …” box. If you are already using a particular folder for this you can keep it as it is, just remember to make it match when you configure Sonarr.
  • In Settings > Transfers > Locations check “Upon completion, move to this location” and point torrents to a folder that we’ll later monitor with Sonarr (e.g. ~/torrents/sonarr-will-handle-this).
  • To avoid being prompted each time a .torrent file is found, go to User interface > Behavior, uncheck “Activate main window when new transfers are loaded” and click the Configure… button next to “Transfer loading priority/location prompt”. Under “Contexts” make sure “Created from watched folder” is unchecked.

Note: Disabling the main window activation on new transfers will also affect the focusing behavior of manually added torrents.

Connecting the dots

Your indexer doesn’t give you .torrent files. Tixati does nothing with .magnet files (what is this anyway, magnet links are links, not files!). Before realizing I could have worked around converting .magnet files in .url files way easier than converting them to .torrent (with a small Bash script), I refactored the hell out of an abandoned piece of code in order to accomplish this. So now I’m using it, because it’s less time consuming than simplifying it. Without further ado, here’s what you need to do:

  • sudo apt-get install python-libtorrent (good luck installing it other way)
  • Clone, download or copy from a floppy disk the Magnet2Torrent script -my version, as the original does something completely different-; I suggest you to put it in any folder present in your PATH.
  • Save this Gist wherever you want. Edit it so magnet_folder points to the folder where .magnet files are being created (which is also the folder Tixati monitors). You may need to define $USER as well.
  • Create a crontab entry calling the script you just saved every 5 minutes.

How things work

  • Sonarr will query an indexer and produce a magnet link, which will be saved as a file (containing just that link) into the Tixati watched folder.
  • The cron job will call Markdown2Torrent to generate a .torrent file in the same folder, removing the .magnet file in the process.
  • Tixati will detect the new .torrent file (and delete it), creating a new download that -once finished- will be saved to the folder Sonarr is monitoring.
  • Sonarr will detect the saved file(s) and move it to the directory corresponding to the Series that initiated the process.
  • If you have set a connection in Settings > Connect, at this point it will tell you the file has been downloaded.

How to make Radarr work with Tixati

It’s almost the same as for Sonarr. Start with the Radarr installation guide and follow this guide, replacing Sonarr with Radarr where necessary.

Troubleshooting

If Sonarr doesn’t generate .magnet files

  • In Settings > General, under “Updates”, set the current branch to develop.
  • From a console run sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /opt/NzbDrone/
  • Back in Sonarr go to System > Updates and click “Install Latest” next to the latest release changelog.