Using Flexget on Tonido

Installing is easy:

sudo pacman -Su flexget

Configuration is a little hairy, as the YAML is very fussy about whitespace.

mkdir .flexget
vi .flexget/config.yml

And transliterate everything from podracer to config.yml:

tasks:
  nakedscientists:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/Naked_Scientists/
  nature:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/rss/nature.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/Nature_Magazine/
  iot:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/iot/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/In_Our_Time/
  scia:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/scia/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/ScienceInAction/
  moreorless:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/moreorless/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/MoreorLess/
  astronomycast:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://www.astronomycast.com/feed/
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/Astronomy_Cast/
  jodcast:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://www.jodcast.net/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/jodcast/
  medicalmatters:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/medmatters/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/MedicalMatters/
  planetmoney:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510289
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/npr/PlanetMoney/
  discovery:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/discovery/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/Discovery/
  insidescience:
    accept_all: yes
    rss: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/inscience/rss.xml
    download: /home/neil/PodCasts/BBC/InsideScience/

And we test the configuration:

flexget check

Flexget does not create directories for you by default:

cat .flexget/config.yml | grep "download:" | sed -e "s/download:/mkdir -p/"

and run the commands generated (being careful about spaces in directory names).

We don’t want to load old podcasts so we teach it about existing podcasts.

flexget execute --learn

We now can schedule this to run overnight:

crontab -e

And add the flexget entry

30 0 * * *   /usr/bin/flexget -c /home/neil/.flexget/config.yml execute --cron

After a few days we look in our PodCasts directory and we find

[nothing]
[zip]
[nada]

We footle around for an hour trying to work out why flexget says it is downloading, when nothing arrives in our PodCasts directory. It may be rogue whitespace in the yml, but

flexget check

doesn’t report any problems.

We notice that flexget is very slow. Frustratingly slow.

This slow:

[neil@tonido ~]$ time flexget check
2014-02-20 03:13 INFO     check                         Config passed check.

real    0m21.465s
user    0m20.190s
sys     0m0.790s

And yes, those times are typical of flexget, so we run:

sudo pacman -Rs flexget
rm -rf .flexget
crontab -e      # and remove the flexget entry
rm -rf PodCasts

and we go back to running good old podracer with its install script hacked to remove the bittorrent dependancy.

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