Getting Started
Here we will install cross-seed
and run our first search.
Installation
with Docker (recommended)
docker run crossseed/cross-seed --version
with npm
Requires node 14 or greater.
npm install -g cross-seed
cross-seed --version
with yarn
Requires node 14 or greater.
yarn global add cross-seed
cross-seed --version
with Unraid
In Unraid, you can install cross-seed
from Docker Hub with the Community
Applications app. Check out the Unraid guide for details.
Running your first search
Docker users can skip ahead to Scaling Up.
To get started, we'll use the following command:
# one liner
cross-seed search --torrent-dir /path/to/dir/with/torrent/files --output-dir . --torznab https://localhost/prowlarr/1/api?apikey=12345
# readable
cross-seed search \
--torrent-dir /path/to/dir/with/torrent/files \
-o . \ # any directory, cross-seed will put its output torrents here
--torznab https://localhost/prowlarr/1/api?apikey=12345 # any valid torznab link, separated by spaces
If you were lucky, you've already got your first cross-seed in your current directory!
cross-seed
, by default, is particular about the contents of torrents you feed
it. It will ignore torrents with non-video files in them, and it will ignore
torrents that look like single episodes.
Use these command line flags to override the default:
--include-episodes --include-non-videos
Scaling Up
Searching like above is nice, but it's pretty manual and not very useful in practice. In this section we'll set up a configuration file. A configuration file is not necessary to use cross-seed, but it makes things a lot easier.
without Docker
Create and edit your config file
Start by running the following command.
cross-seed gen-config
After that, you will find an autogenerated config file at
~/.cross-seed/config.js
AppData\Local\cross-seed\config.js
. Open this file
in your editor of choice, and start editing.
The config file uses JavaScript syntax. Each option in the config (and each element in a list) must be separated by a comma, and make sure to wrap your strings in "quotation marks".
The only required options are torznab
,
torrentDir
, and
outputDir
(see links for details). Once
you've configured those, you can try running the app with
cross-seed search
With that command, cross-seed
should get started running through a full scan
of your torrent directory!
with Docker
Set up your container
With Docker, any paths that you would provide as command-line arguments or in the config file should stay hardcoded, and instead you can mount volumes to the Docker container.
/config
- config dir (this follows a common Docker convention)/torrents
- your torrent input dir (usually set to your rtorrent session dir, or your qBittorrent BT_backup dir)/cross-seeds
- the output dir. People sometimes point this at a watch folder. If you use autotorrent2 you can set it up to read from this folder.
Create or open your existing docker-compose.yml
file and add the cross-seed
service:
version: "2.1"
services:
cross-seed:
image: crossseed/cross-seed
container_name: cross-seed
user: 1000:1000 # optional but recommended
volumes:
- /path/to/config/folder:/config
- /path/to/rtorrent_sess:/torrents:ro # note that this volume can and should be mounted read-only
- /path/to/output/folder:/cross-seeds
command: search
Create a config file
When you run the container the first time, it will create a config file at
/config/config.js
. Open this file in your favorite editor. Since you've
already configured your volume mappings, the only required config option is
torznab
. Once you've got that set up, you
can run your Docker container and it should get started running through a full
scan of your torrent directory!
Next Steps
cross-seed
has two subcommands: search
and daemon
.
search
(used above) will scan each torrent you provide and look for cross-seeds, then exit.daemon
will run forever, and can be configured to run searches periodically, watch RSS, and search for newly finished downloads.
If you're satisfied by just running cross-seed search
every once in a while,
and then using autotorrent2
to inject these into your client, then
you're done!
If you want to learn more about fully-automatic cross-seeding, keep reading.