Babou

Babou, the rogue ocelot.

A fully open-source, BSD licensed torrent tracker written in the Go programming language.

Babou is inspired by popular private tracker software. This means we focus on building communities which grow organically, encourage quality uploads, and whose members contribute bandwidth to the swarms.

The main goal of the babou project is to provide a full stack solution in a single binary with minimal dependencies. This means that with a single command: you will be able to bring up both the frontend [the web-server] and the backend [the tracker itself].

Deployment of babou merely requires access to a PostgreSQL database. That's. It.

---

Development of babou does not require anything which cannot be obtained using a standard Go development environment. (With the go command in your $PATH.)

Requirements

We recommend you use the current Go release installation. All tests and benchmarks published for this project use Go's latest release tip unless otherwise noted.

• Go release (known minimum: release 1.1)
• PostgreSQL 9.3 or higher

(We do not currently offer binary packages. In the future, however, you will not need Go to get started with babou. -- The deployment environment itself does need the Go toolkit. These tools are only required for development.)

Features [On the roadmap]

• Wiki

  • Support for markdown formatting
  • Central repository for site documentation.
  • Collection of user-written articles about uploads on the site.

• Discussions

  • An environment where your community can stay in touch with one-another.
  • Will incl. some form of private messaging as well as group discussions.
  • Will incl. some searching, tagging, and some form of categorization.

• Feedback Tools

  • A simple collection of survey tools (polls, etc.) to collect feedback from your community.

• Torrent Searching: and it's going to be so awesome!

  • Torrents will be [full-text] searchable.
  • Torrents will also be organized via tagging.

• Ratio Strategies:

  • We realize that not all private trackers watch ratios the same way. In fact, some trackers may not actively monitor on ratios at all. As such we aim to support several different ratio-watch strategies.

  • For e.g: global freelech, scoped freelech, seeding vs leeching, snatches vs grabs, uploaded [bytes] vs downloaded [bytes], etc.

• Torrent "Collections": this includes things like collages, albums, discographies, seasons, series [of books], etc.

  • We want individual torrents to be intelligently grouped together for a myriad of different media types.

• Permissions will be baked into all these features.

(All in due time. If you'd like to get a sense of the roadmap please check TODO.md)

---

babou is designed to be "fast like a veyron" out of the box.

babou has a completely distributed architecture. Your "pack" of trackers and frontends can be connected together using what we call the "event bridge."

This bridge allows babou's to securely communicate with one-another about active users, torrents, and peers.

This means you can easily put babou behind a reverse proxy, such as nginx, to help distribute your site's load across several machines.

How do I run it?

Run ./babou -help or view INSTALL.md to get an idea of how babou should be configured and deployed.

Many options are configurable through config/example.json You will need to pass the path to this configuration file using the -config-path= command line flag.

!!! IMPORTANT !!!

Please note that babou presently requires some manual configuration of the source to work in your environment. babou uses many hard-coded encryption secrets which are openly distributed.

Using the default secrets is dangerous and completely insecure. babou is NOT FIT FOR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS without configuring the secrets.

If you do not understand the implications of this: I ask that you only use babou in controlled environments. (Such as behind a network firewall.)

---

Directory Structure

AKA What do I need to deploy?

babou must be started from a working directory which contains:

working dir
	|--/assets 				(static resources [css, images, js])
	|--/app/views 			(`mustache` templates, partials)
	|--/config/dev.json 	(unless specified otherwise by `-config-path`)

babou should be installed from a working directory containing the above AND:

working dir
	|--/db 	(`goose` databse config + migrations for dev + install)

All other directories contain source-code and SHOULD NOT be part of your deployment.

If you're serving from a development directory: please make sure app/*, config/*, and db/* are not accessible from the outside!

Only the /assets directory should be exposed to the outside world.

/assets should ideally be served by a CDN in production. If a CDN is not feasible: you may want to consider using a server that is very good with static assets. (I prefer nginx...)