Zeedit

This terminal program uses the lbrytools library to download content from various channels, cleaning older files in the process, in order to seed those files to the LBRY network.

This script should be run periodically to constantly download new content, and remove older files if they take too much space.

This program is released as free software under the MIT license.

Motivation

The LBRY Desktop application provides basic functionality to manage downloaded claims, but at the moment it doesn't give us advanced tools to periodically download new content from selected channels.

The zeedit program allows us to define a list of channels from which to download the newest content, and control how much space the files take in our system. It can be used to create a terminal or GUI-based seedbox that requires little user intervention, which will help strengthen the peer to peer LBRY network.

This program was inspired by tuxfoo's lbry-seedit script, which provides basic functions, and a configuration file to download and seed claims. Initially tuxfoo's code was extended slightly but eventually an entire library and this program were written from scratch to provide more tools to the user.

Installation

You must have Python installed. Most Linux distributions come with Python ready to use; for Windows you may need to get the official package, or a full featured distribution such as Anaconda. In Windows, make sure the Python executable is added to the PATH so that it can be launched from anywhere in your system.

You must have the LBRY Desktop application or the standalone lbrynet terminal client. Get them from lbry.com/get.

Requisites

The requests library is necessary to communicate with the running LBRY daemon:

python -m pip install --user requests
python3 -m pip install --user requests  # for Ubuntu

You can install these and other libraries by using pip, the Python package manager. If this is not installed it can be installed:

sudo apt install python-pip
sudo apt install python3-pip  # for Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S python-pip  # for Arch

lbrytools

You must have the lbrytools library.

Clone this repository using Git with --recurse-submodules to include lbrytools with the rest of the code:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/belikor/zeedit

After cloning you should have the following structure:

zeedit/
    zeedit
    zeedit_config_example.py
    lbrytools/

Running in place

You can run the zeedit program where it is.

python zeedit

If you place zeedit somewhere else, make sure it is next to lbrytools/.

Updating

To update the program's code, make sure you are in the zeedit/ directory:

cd zeedit/
git pull

The lbrytools library is hosted in its own repository, and is used in this program as a submodule. To update this component:

git submodule update --remote --rebase lbrytools/

If this causes merging errors you may have to update the submodule manually:

cd zeedit/lbrytools/
git fetch
git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

System wide installation

This is optional, and only required if you want to have the libraries available in your entire system.

Copy the lbrytools directory (the one with an __init__.py), and place it inside a site-packages directory that is searched by Python. This can be in the user's home directory,

/home/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/lbrytools

or in a system-wide directory:

/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/lbrytools
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lbrytools

Then place zeedit wherever you want, and run it from there.

Environmental variables

This is optional. Instead of moving the lbrytools library, simply add it to the PYTHONPATH environmental variable. We must add the parent directory containing this library.

For example, if

/top1/pkg/
    lbrytools/

The variable will be

PYTHONPATH="/top1/pkg:$PYTHONPATH"

Usage

Make sure the lbrynet daemon is running either by launching the full LBRY Desktop application, or by starting the console lbrynet program.

lbrynet start

If lbrytools is correctly installed in the Python path, the script can be executed directly, or through the Python interpreter.

python zeedit [config.py]
python3 zeedit [config.py]  # for Ubuntu

A configuration file should be passed as the first argument.

python zeedit funny_config.py
python zeedit tech_channels_config.py
python zeedit cooking_conf.py

The configuration file specifies the channels to download content from, the download directory, the limit in gigabytes before cleanup of older files is started, and whether to write a summary of all downloaded claims.

Modify the zeedit_config_example.py to your liking, and read the comments in it to understand what each variable does. Only the channels variable is mandatory, all others have a default value if they are missing in the configuration file.

If no argument is given, or if the provided configuration file does not exist, it will default to loading a configuration under the name zeedit_config.py; if this is not available, it will simply exit.

To keep everything contained, the lbrytools package can be placed in the same directory as the zeedit executable and its zeedit_config.py.

top/
   zeedit
   zeedit_config.py
   lbrytools/
       __init___.py
       blobs.py
       ...

Development

Ideally, this collection of tools can be merged into the official LBRY sources so that everybody has access to them without installing separate programs. Where possible, the tools should also be available from a graphical interface such as the LBRY Desktop application.

• lbryio/lbry-sdk
• lbryio/lbry-desktop

If you wish to support this work you can send a donation:

LBC: bY38MHNfE59ncq3Ch3zLW5g41ckGoHMzDq
XMR: 8565RALsab2cWsSyLg4v1dbLkd3quc7sciqFJ2mpfip6PeVyBt4ZUbZesAAVpKG1M31Qi5k9mpDSGSDpb3fK5hKYSUs8Zff