Drone Factory is Deprecated [seedbox -> uftp, not driven by Sonarr]

Help & Support
#1

My setup as working with Drone Factory:

  • Seedbox using autodl-irssi (downloads a lot of shows I don’t actually watch for ratio).
  • script runs on download complete, if it matches a show I watch, it gets transferred to my home computer via uftp (with a Temp download folder while transferring, and a Destination folder where complete downloads get moved).
  • Sonarr drone factory watches the Complete download folder

I’ve never had any issues with this setup. Files are always complete in the Complete folder.

uftpd has an option to run a script after moving completed files to the Destination folder, I’m just not familiar with how to use it. If the transfer was a folder I think it passes an array of full file paths to the script. uftpd is running on a linux box on my home network, with the Destination folder being a samba share from the Windows computer running Sonarr.

I saw in other posts that the DownloadedEpisodesScan command takes a path that has to be a folder containing one file to process… My setup does not create folders, all video files are saved in one ‘Complete’ folder.

Can I call the DownloadedEpisodesScan with a root folder? I saw in another post that calling DownloadedEpisodesScan without a path uses the DroneFactory path as a root and scans it… will that path setting be preserved (even if hidden) in v3?

I don’t have much time to invest in this, especially when DroneFactory still works and v3 is not anytime soon, but good to know what my options are when I have the time to play with it.
Thanks.

#2

There’s a couple of things I’d like to say about your setup, but first the big question:

Can I call the DownloadedEpisodesScan with a root folder?

No, the commands operates on individual ‘job’ folders/files, basically a single ‘download’ with related files, such as subs. or a season pack.
But you should be able to do that easily in your script: Just iterate over your destination folder in a non-recursive fashion, you can safely kick of the API call for each one individually since you said those files/folders have completed transferred.

But you could also just keep the Drone Factory for now since you don’t have a lot of time and the ‘temp folder’ guarantee should make it work properly. It’s not gonna disappear suddenly, v3 will likely be a manual update, it’s not like we’re going to push such a breaking change automatically.

A couple of other things:

How do you get it to filter between duplicates/upgrades? Depending on your irssi rules, you could be seeing downloads for multiple qualities and release groups. And Sonarr could be rejecting imports in some cases.

Sonarr supports a ReleasePush api and people have already written scripts to feed the irssi notifications into it, any release pushed that way gets evaluated by Sonarr’s decision logic and either downloaded or rejected.
I would’ve suggested this, coz then you could push the shows you watch via Sonarr (irssi -> Sonarr Push API -> Download Client -> uftp -> Sonarr Remote Path Mapping -> Sonarr Import), and everything else directly from irssi to you download client in a different category on your seedbox. But since you mentioned you don’t have much time, that’s probably not an option.
Still, maybe something to consider in the future.

#3

I only transfer 1080p WEB-DL quality from seedbox. Sonarr drives Usenet downloads for lesser qualities. When I implemented it this way a few years ago, I found usenet to be slow to get the 1080p WEB-DLs, so I started transferring those from the seedbox. The tracker I use doesn’t allow duplicates / multiple release groups. Sonarr does on occasion reject duplicates, but only in the rare case where it downloaded the 1080p WEB-DL already from usenet. I check my drone factory folder every couple of months and find a handful of files to delete.

This sounds interesting, although I’m not convinced it would be as stable as my current setup. I have a high latency connection between seedbox and Sonarr server, with times during the day where connections time out. The less chatter between them the better. In my current setup, everything happens locally on the seedbox until download completed, and then uftp runs locally on the seedbox and attempts to transfer. If it fails to connect, sonarr eventually gets it from usenet.

Questions:

  • Is the ReleasePush deciding what gets downloaded by the download client? Or is it just notifying Sonarr of what was already matched to download by the client? I pretty much download every webdl release in my download client, Sonarr would need to decide to push to uftp, not to decide to send to the download client.
  • If Sonarr is just pushing to uftp, how does it know when the download client has finished downloading?

As I understand your description, irssi on the seedbox would have to push a notification to Sonarr (chatter), then Sonarr decides if it gets downloaded, and notifies the download client of the download url (chatter), then presumably listens for a notification from the download client that the download has finished (chatter) and then remotely starts uftp on the server (chatter) to transfer the file to a local folder where Sonarr can import from (using the remote path mapping to find it based on the download location reported by the download client).

I’m probably misunderstanding some of it, but that’s a lot of points of failure due to network timeouts. The seedbox shouldn’t be relying on my computer at home to work.

#4

Yeah, that’s far from ideal, it’d likely mess with the whole thing.

Answers:

  • yes, it’s basically like the standard rss sync (10-15min interval) logic, just a bit faster. Sonarr can’t push to uftp, well, unless you used a Torrent Blackhole client.
  • n/a unless you use a Torrent Blackhole client. coz Blackhole is like a miniature Drone Factory.

You’ve accurately described the issue: In your case you’re not really using Sonarr to download torrents, you’re just using it to download usenet and then sideload downloads from an ‘external’ source, like some people do with custom PVR recordings. The DownloadedEpisodesScan is still the preferred method of signaling Sonarr to import such files. But I think in the current setup, you can get away with leaving it like it is, given the time constraints.
An option could be to use a Torrent Blackhole instead of a Drone Factory, in which case the Blackhole is used for importing instead of downloading. Blackhole is a bit more specialized than Drone Factory, all top level files and folders must be individual downloads and will be processed as a whole. But given uftp’s behavior, it’s not that different, so not worth dealing with until you have more time.

#5

Ok, thanks for your time, I’ll leave it alone for now, and plan to eventually write a script which gets executed by uftp when a transfer finishes and triggers the DownloadedEpisodesScan.

#6

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