Prunerr

Perma-seed Servarr media libraries

TL;DR: Perma-seeding of whole Servarr libraries optimized for per-tracker ratio.

• Delete torrents/items only as disk space gets low.
• Don't delete currently imported items. IOW, only delete upgraded items.
• Don't delete private items that haven't met seeding requirements.
• Delete public items first.
• Delete private items in an order to maximize tracker ratio and/or bonuses.
• Delete stalled items , and items containing archives such as *.rar releases and blacklist them, AKA mark them as failed, in Servarr.
• And more...

Table of Contents

• Summary
• Installation
  • Local Installation
  • Docker Container Image
• Usage
• Order of Operations
• Export sub-command
• Contributing
• Motivation
• References

Summary

Seed Servarr download client torrents/items as long as possible only deleting them as necessary as disk space gets low, hence the name based on "to prune". Which download items are considered eligible for deletion is configured by the user. The common case is that download items that are currently imported are not considered for deletion. Neither are items from private trackers/indexers that have been upgraded or otherwise deleted from the library but haven't met the indexers seeding requirements. The order in which download items are deleted is determined according to rules configured by the user. The common case is to delete items from public indexers first and among those to delete the items with the highest ratio first to preserve the health of the community by seeding less popular items longer. Next delete items from private indexers by configured indexer priority and within the items for a given indexer to delete items in an order to maximize ratio and/or seeding rewards.

Other configured operations may be applied as well. For example:

• Verify and resume corrupt items
• Increase bandwidth priority for items from private indexers
• Decrease bandwidth priority for items from public indexers
• Remove and blacklist download items containing archives (*.rar, *.zip, *.tar.gz, etc.) which can't be perma-seeded
• Remove and blacklist stalled download items
• etc.

The $ prunerr command is intended to serve as a companion to the Servarr [1] suite of applications and services and the Transmission BitTorrent client [2]. It periodically polls the download clients [3] of Sonarr [4], Radarr [5], etc. and applies the configured operations to the download items in each of those download clients. It can also be run independently of any Servarr instances to optimize seeding for download items added by other means, e.g. FlexGet [6].

See the Usage section below for full details.

Installation

Install locally or use the Docker container image:

Local Installation

Install by using any tool for installing standard Python 3 distributions such as pip [7]:

$ pip3 install --user prunerr

Optional shell prompt tab completion is available by using argcomplete [8].

Docker Container Image

The recommended way to use the container image is by using Docker Compose [9]. See the example ./docker-compose.yml file [10]. Write your configuration and run the container:

$ docker compose up

You can also use the image directly. Pull the Docker image [11]. Use it to create and run a container:

$ docker pull "registry.gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr"
$ docker run --rm -it "registry.gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr" ...

Use image variant tags to control when the image updates. Releases publish tags for the branch and for major and minor versions. For example, to keep up to date with a specific branch, use a tag such as registry.gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr:main. Releases from develop publish pre-releases. Releases from main publish final releases. Releases from main also publish tags without a branch, for example registry.gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr. Releases from main also publish tags for the major and minor version, for example registry.gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr:v0.8.

Releases publish multi-platform images for the following platforms:

• linux/amd64
• linux/arm64
• linux/arm/v7

Usage

Start by writing your ~/.config/prunerr.yml configuration file. See the comments in the example configuration [12] for details.

Once configured, you may run individual sub-commands once, run all operations once as configured using the $ prunerr exec sub-command, or run all operations in a polling loop using the $ prunerr daemon sub-command. See the Order of Operations section for a detailed description of the operations. Use the CLI help to list the other sub-commands and to get help on the individual sub-commands:

$ prunerr --help
$ prunerr exec --help

If using the Docker container image, the container can be run from the command-line as well:

$ docker compose run "prunerr" prunerr --help

Order of Operations

Note that polling is required because there is no event we can subscribe to that reliably determines disk space margin as the download clients are downloading. Every run of the $ prunerr exec sub-command or every loop of the $ prunerr daemon sub-command performs the following operations.

1. Verify and resume corrupt items, same as: $ prunerr verify.

2. Review download items, same as: $ prunerr review:

   Apply per-indexer review operations as configured under indexers/reviews in the configuration file to all download items.

3. Move download items that have been acted on by Servarr to the */seeding/* directory, same as: $ prunerr move.

   As Servarr acts on completed download items, be that importing files from them, ignoring them, deleting them from the queue, etc., Prunerr moves those items from the Servarr download client's Directory to a parallel */seeding/* directory. Then when deleting download items to free space, Prunerr only considers items under that directory. This has the added benefit of reflecting which items have been acted on by Servarr in the download client.

4. Delete download items if disk space is low, same as: $ prunerr free-space.

   Consider items for deletion in different groups in this order:

   1. Download items no longer registered with tracker.

      IOW, items that can no longer be seeded at all first.

   2. Orphan files and directories not belonging to any download item

      Walk all the top-level directories used by each download client and identify which paths don't correspond to a download client item.

      Warning

      Stop Prunerr before moving any download items.

      Prunerr uses the list of files for every download item to identify orphans. If a user, or anything else other than Prunerr, moves or changes the location of a download item while Prunerr is identifying orphans, Prunerr may identify the new download item data path as an orphan and delete it out from under the download item leading to data loss.

   3. Imported/seeding download items

      IOW, download items that have been acted upon by Servarr and moved to the */seeding/* directory by the $ prunerr move sub-command/operation excluding those items filtered out according to the indexers/priorities operations with filter: true. For example, don't delete currently imported items (by hard link count) or items that haven't met private indexer seeding requirements.

   For each of these groups in order, loop through each item in the group and:

   1. Check disk space against the margin configured by download-clients/*/max-download-bandwidth and download-clients/*/min-download-time-margin
   2. If there's insufficient disk space, delete the item.

   For the orphans group, delete smaller items first to minimize the amount of re-downloading needed should the user notice and correct any issues resulting in the orphans.

   For the other groups delete items in the order determined by the configured indexers/priorities indexer order then by the configured operations for that item's indexer.

   For those times when there's nothing Prunerr can delete to free disk space, most users' download clients should also probably pause downloading when disk space drops significantly below this margin. Use the provided Transmission pause download script [13] and, optionally, integrate it into your Docker Compose project via a cron job [14] or see those as examples.

Export sub-command

The export sub-command is roughly the inverse of Servarr import events, hard link imported files back into download client items and verify. See the CLI $ prunerr export --help output for more details.

Contributing

GitLab hosts this project [15] and mirrors it to GitHub [16] but use GitLab for reporting issues, submitting pull or merge requests and any other development or maintenance activity. See the contributing documentation [17] for more details on how to get started with development.

Motivation

I didn't like the available options I could find at the time for maximizing seeding from a lovingly managed media library. Deleting by a ratio threshold doesn't make sense to me because that can delete items when there's plenty of disk space. Also the ratio threshold is a reverse indicator for items from private indexers vs items from public indexers. Items from private indexers with high ratios should be kept around as long as possible to build user total ratio whereas items from public indexers with low ratios should be kept around as long as possible to preserve access in the community/ecosystem. Finally, deleting any item still imported in the Servarr only because it hit the ratio threshold is the biggest waste since it doesn't free any space. So I wrote Prunerr to prune download items in the correct order.

The use case for Prunerr is not tracker ratio racing. It's goal is to seed as long as possible and to seed as much of your library as possible. This should have some secondary benefits to ratio, but that's not the main goal.

Finally, there is a laundry list of other download client management tasks that can be automated but aren't by anything I could find. So I added them to Prunerr as well.

References

[1]	https://wiki.servarr.com

[2]	https://transmissionbt.com/

[3]	https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/settings#download-clients

[4]	https://wiki.servarr.com/en/sonarr

[5]	https://wiki.servarr.com/en/radarr

[6]	https://flexget.com/

[7]	https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/

[8]	https://kislyuk.github.io/argcomplete/#installation

[9]	https://docs.docker.com/compose/

[10]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr/-/blob/main/docker-compose.yml

[11]	https://hub.docker.com/r/merpatterson/prunerr

[12]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr/blob/main/src/prunerr/home/.config/prunerr.yml

[13]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr/blob/main/transmission/usr/local/bin/transmission-pause-download

[14]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr/blob/main/transmission/etc/crontabs/abc

[15]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr

[16]	https://github.com/rpatterson/prunerr

[17]	https://gitlab.com/rpatterson/prunerr/-/blob/main/docs/contributing.rst