Automatic TV Downloading with Ubuntu Server, SickBeard, and Transmission
Preface
Hiya. I’ve been trying off and on to finalize my torrent setup, particularly with regards to TV shows. This guide is an attempt to describe my particular setup, how I do everything, and how to replicate it. There are two main requirements for the setup:
Ubuntu Server running on either a local server, or a rented VM which you have full administrative access to. I’ve recently upgraded from the 14.04.2 LTS to the 16.04 LTS and had to make no changes to my setup, so I’ll assume that you can use either.
An account with BroadcasTheNet. This is really the biggest barrier to entry for this guide - if you’re going to follow it to a ’T’ then you’re going to have to have one. It’s basically impossible to get an invite right now, so to be perfectly honest - if you don’t have one, figure out something else to use. It will probably not be as ideal, unfortunately.
What you should have done before starting the guide
Understand how your server works. You need to be able to ssh into the box, edit configuration files, and navigate the file structure without me holding your hand. Seriously, you’ll have too much trouble getting to the end of the guide if you don’t have a good feel for how to use the command line.
Set up and configure Transmission on your box, optionally using Transmission Remote GUI as an easier method of viewing your active torrents. You can find an extensive how-to here. Additionally, you should make sure that you have a watch directory set up. We are going to be using some extra software to add multiple watch directory functionality to Transmission, as it does not support it natively.
Part 1: Installing and Configuring SickBeard
Head on over to the SickBeard GitHub page and click on the green “clone or download” button. Copy the URL provided, and open your preferred terminal software. SSH into your box and cd into the directory you’d like to store the SickBeard folder. This folder will stay here permanently, so pick somewhere you don’t mind it staying. Execute the following command:
git clone https://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard/ ~/.sickbeard
Let git do it’s work, and once it’s finished, cd into the new directory and make sure the main script is executable.
chmod +x SickBeard.py
If you have any other services or programs occupying port 8081, you’ll need to switch the main port that SickBeard uses. Do this by editing the web_port line near the beginning of config.ini. Now that we’ve got that sorted, let’s make sure our firewall won’t be hindering our ability to run the SickBeard web server. If you weren’t aware, ufw (Uncomplicated FireWall) is the enabled-by-default firewall in Ubuntu. If you’d rather run without the firewall, you can run sudo ufw disable. Do that at your own risk! To open the port for SickBeard, execute:
sudo ufw allow 8081
Obviously, substituting your new port if you changed it in config.ini. If you want to be able to access SickBeard from anywhere not on your local network (through a domain name, for example), this is probably the best time to forward the port on your router.
Now we can install SickBeard’s dependency:
sudo apt-get install python-cheetah
Once that’s installed we can go ahead and start SickBeard.
python ~/.sickbeard/SickBeard.py
This will load SickBeard, and you’ll see the console window change to a psuedo-GUI, which we can ignore. Open a web browser and navigate to http://192.168.1.100:8081, substituting the proper local IP address for your server (and port if you changed it earlier). This will open up the SickBeard user interface.
Click the “Config” button near the top of the page, and then go to the “Search Settings” tab. Uncheck “Search NZBs” and check “Search Torrents”. If you’re OK with using a single watch directory and a single download folder for all of your torrents (not just ones from SickBeard), then you can set “Torrent Black Hole” to your Transmission watch directory. Transmission will grab the .torrents automatically, and start downloading. Because I prefer to have multiple watch directories that download to different final directories, I set my folders up as follows:
“Black Holes”:
/media/data/torrents/watch/tv shows /media/data/torrents/watch/movies /media/data/torrents/watch/music
Right now TV shows are really all we care about, but when we set up the multiple watch folder functionality (if you choose to do that as well) we’ll need each folder. I’ll explain how these folders work in the next section.
On the “Search Providers” tab, under “Provider Priorities”, check off BTN. Head over to BTN, sign in, and go to your edit profile page. There’s a tab for API - your API key is located there. Paste this key into the box on the Sickbeard page. Be sure you don’t share this key with anyone else!
On the “Post Processing” tab, fill out “TV Download Dir”, check off “Keep Original Files”, “Rename Episodes”, and “Scan and Process”. Fill out the naming section as desired. Fill out the “Notifications” tab if desired.
Back at the home section of SickBeard, click on “Add Shows”. Click “add existing shows”, and add your main TV show directory to the list. SickBeard will go through and find all the shows you have, and prompt you to make sure that it has the right match.
At this time, it is also wise to specify the desired video quality for each show. Every show has an “initial” and an “archive” option - SickBeard will snatch a format from the initial section in the interest of getting the file as early as possible. Sometimes shows take a bit to show up on trackers, especially the higher quality stuff like 1080p BluRay rips. SickBeard automates this process and will snatch something to watch quickly, eventually downloading the archive quality. It’s important to decide these settings on a show-by-show basis. As an example, I like the show How It’s Made. It’s been on the air for a really long time, so there are early seasons that are only available in standard definition, and newer episodes are available in 1080p. Here’s how I have the show set up.
When a new show is uploaded after it airs, SickBeard finds the torrent group and checks these settings. It will first download the highest quality available that you have selected under the “initial” column. It’s important to select the standard definition entries as well, because we want it to be able to select older, standard definition only torrents to complete our collection. Once the show has been downloaded and stored, SickBeard will continue checking the torrent release group for newer quality releases. If there is a torrent available for a release of a higher quality, and it is selected under the “archive” column, SickBeard will re-download that torrent and replace the inferior quality version. This is particularly handy for shows that I really want high-quality releases of, like Game of Thrones, or Mr. Robot. SickBeard is able to get me a nice-enough 1080p WEB-DL release so I can watch it after it airs. Because the 1080p BluRay rips only come out as BluRays (duh), once they become available, SickBeard will go and get them for me! These high quality rips come at the cost of disk space, so configuring this option on a per-show basis is important.
At this point, SickBeard should be able to recognize shows, find new shows, and download the appropriate .torrent files and place them into your “tv shows black hole”.
Optionally configuring multiple Transmission watch directories
The next thing to consider is whether or not you want to be able to use the Transmission watch directory as-is, or use a script to give you multiple watch directories. If you choose to do it with a single watch directory, all of your BTN downloads will be saved to your default downloads directory, and will have to stay there until you get rid of them. For this reason, combined with the fact that I also want to be able to have a watch folder for music and movie torrents, I chose to go with multiple watch directories. If you’d rather not have multiple watch directories, skip this section.
To reiterate, you’ll need to actually create the watch directories. It’s up to you where to put them, but mine are:
/media/data/torrents/watch/tv shows /media/data/torrents/watch/movies /media/data/torrents/watch/music
Transmission is configured to watch some other directory, but we’ll need a script to watch the black holes and add them to segregated download directories. We’re essentially going to be writing our own watch script. Or at least I am, anyways.
Over on the Github page for my script, click on the green “clone or download” button, and copy the resulting URL. Head over to your terminal and clone it into a directory of your choosing.
git clone https://github.com/taylorthurlow/Transmission_Multiple_Watch_Folders.git ~/watch
For the sake of clarity, I’ll explain each of the components of the script you just cloned.
main.py - The main script that runs constantly and watches our watch directories. It also handles communicating with Transmission. We’ll need to edit this to include our directories and Transmission server information.
startup.sh - The script we’ll be executing on startup of the box to make sure that our script runs in the background.
README.md - Duh.
six.py - A library for Python which helps write code compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3
transmissionrpc - A library for Python which enables communication with our Transmission server.
Make sure that main.py and startup.sh are executable by running:
sudo chmod +x main.py startup.sh
Edit main.py and fill out the “watch directories” and “complete download directories” sections. Mine are as follows:
# Watch directories watch_tv = ‘/media/data/torrents/watch/tv shows’ watch_movie = ‘/media/data/torrents/watch/movies’ watch_music = ‘/media/data/torrents/watch/music’ # Complete download directories download_dir_tv = ‘/media/data/torrents/btn’ download_dir_movie = ‘/media/data/torrents/movies’ download_dir_music = ‘/media/data/torrents/down’
Also make sure to fill out the Transmission section. Usually your IP address will be 127.0.0.1 and the port will be 9091. Your user and password will be the same ones you use for your Transmission Remote GUI. Save the file.
Now we need to add it as a service using systemd so it’ll start at startup, invisibly.
nano /etc/systemd/system/watchdirs.service
[Unit] Description=Runs script for multiple Transmission watch directories [Service] ExecStart=/home/USERNAME_HERE/watch/startup.sh [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Once that file is in place and you have substituted USERNAME_HERE for your proper username, save the file and run the following commands
sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable watchdirs.service sudo systemctl start watchdirs.service
Now the script is running in the background. After about a minute you should see the log.txt file in the watch folder populate with script output. This is how you know it’s running.
If we place a .torrent into any of the watch folders, every minute the script will grab them and load them into Transmission with the proper download destination. On top of that, because we’ve already configured SickBeard to rename and sort our TV downloads, it’ll realize they’ve finished downloading and sort them automatically into the appropriate storage directories.
And that’s it! Now all you need to do is let SickBeard do it’s thing - find new episodes of your favorite shows, automatically download them, and file them away!