SQLite stays; sign-in is local user/pass or the Authentik already fronting ipodderx.sdf1.net. Feeds, items and files shared; read state and subscriptions per user. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AdXho5tTkjFLeUXKbEjKBh
66 KiB
Progress
Running record of what has actually landed. Newest entry first.
The full design and step list live in the plan file at
/config/.claude/plans/i-want-to-create-playful-quiche.md.
Build order
- 1. Repo skeleton — git init (
main),cargo init --name ipx, deps pinned, LICENSE, README, this file. - 2.
config.rs+db.rs— TOML config structs + SQLite schema. - 3.
feed.rs— conditional GET, RSS-then-Atom parse, persist entries. - 4.
download.rs— downloads, filters, dedupe. - 5.
retention.rs— oldest-first quota + age reaper. - 6.
ipc.rs+ daemon — UDS JSON-lines server, TTL scheduler, CLI-proxies-to-daemon. - 7.
torrent.rs— librqbit, seed to ratio/time, stall abort. (swarm download unverified — see the step 7 entry) - 8. OPML + polish — import/export, add/rm/status, tracing setup, systemd units, README.
Phase 2 — web front end
Decided with Ray: axum serving plain HTML/JS (no WASM toolchain), running inside the daemon process so it reads SQLite and the event bus directly, LAN-bindable with a shared token.
- 9. Config hot-reload + web skeleton.
Ctx.cfgbecomesRwLock<Arc<Config>>so the UI can edit feeds without a daemon restart.[web]config section (enabled/bind/token, token auto-generated and saved on first run). axum server started byipx daemon, token checked by middleware,?token=sets a cookie so<audio>requests authenticate too. Done when:ipx daemonserves a page on the configured bind, and a wrong token gets 401. - 10. Browsing.
/api/feeds,/api/feeds/:id/entries, entry detail. Descriptions are untrusted feed HTML — sanitized withammoniabefore they reach the page. Done when: the Glass Cannon feed's 131 entries browse and read correctly. - 11. Media actions. Range-request audio streaming (
tower-httpServeFile) so seeking works, download-on-demand for a pending enclosure, delete a file, mark read/flagged. Done when: an episode plays and seeks in a browser, and delete reaps the row. - 12. Feed configuration. Add/remove feeds and edit folder, keywords, allow_explicit, auto_download, max_new_per_check from the UI, written back to config.toml and hot-reloaded. Done when: flipping allow_explicit in the UI takes effect on the next scan with no restart.
- 13. Live progress + polish. SSE from the existing broadcast bus so downloads show live. README section, screenshot-free usage notes. Done when: starting a fetch from the UI shows progress advancing without a reload.
Note: read/flagged finally get a writer here. Retention orders by them (see the step 5 entry),
and until now nothing set them.
Smoke tests
ipx add <feed>+ipx fetch→ file indownload_dir/<Show>/, row inenclosures.ipx fetchagain → no re-download, feed skipped for TTL.ipx daemon &+nc -U $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ipx.sock, send{"cmd":"fetch"}→ JSON events; a concurrentipx fetchproxies to the daemon instead of downloading in parallel.- Delete a downloaded file by hand,
ipx fetch→ NOT re-downloaded. - Torrent enclosure → downloads, moves, stops seeding at the configured ratio/time.
ipx reap --dry-rununder quota pressure → oldest-first hit list; real run flips rows toreaped.
Multi-user — the plan
Decided with Ray: stay on SQLite (Postgres was considered and dropped -- it is a deployment
choice, not a capability one, and nothing here contends for writes). Sign-in is either a local
username and password or the Authentik that already fronts ipodderx.sdf1.net through a Cloudflare
tunnel. Feeds, items and files are shared; read state and subscriptions are per user.
The point of sharing: two people subscribed to the same show cost one fetch, one parse, and one file
on disk. enclosures.url is already globally UNIQUE, so the file half is nearly free.
- A. Users, sessions, sign-in.
users+sessionstables, Argon2 hashing, session cookie,ipx user add|list|passwd|rm. Authentik/proxy header (trusted_headerin[web]) signs in and optionally creates a user. The existing shared token keeps working and resolves to the admin, so the healthcheck and any scripts survive. Login page for direct access. - B. Per-user read state.
entry_state(user_id, feed_id, guid, read, flagged, position); the current columns onentriesmigrate into the first user's rows. Unread counts, filters and playback position all become per user. - C. Per-user subscriptions.
subscriptions(user_id, feed_id). config.toml stays the feed catalogue; the UI lists only what you subscribe to. Adding a feed someone else already has costs nothing. A feed nobody subscribes to stops being scanned but keeps its files. - D. One file, many users. Auto-download when any subscriber wants it; retention never deletes a file another user has starred or not yet played; deleting a download says so when someone else still has it.
2026-09-10 — Items, not episodes
Half the library is text feeds, so the UI no longer calls everything an episode: counts, the search
box, the empty detail pane, the phone back button, the retention and per-feed settings, and the
download dialog all say item now. The sidebar's 20 eps reads 20 items.
S1E1 badges stay -- those come from itunes:episode/itunes:season and only appear when a feed
actually publishes them -- as does the episode column, which is that same field.
2026-09-10 — Scanning stopped strobing
A scan of 85 feeds fires 85 feed_done events, and the UI refreshed on every one: a full sidebar
rebuild plus an episode reload each time, which read as flicker. Bursts now collapse into one
refresh (500ms trailing), the per-feed "N new" toasts add up into a single summary, and both lists
keep their scroll position across a rebuild instead of jumping to the top.
Measured over a full scan: 11 feed refreshes and 2 episode reloads in 45 seconds, down from one per event.
Settings and Log moved out of the header and toolbar into a footer under the feed list -- they are housekeeping, not daily controls. The theme toggle stays in the header.
2026-09-10 — Defaults and chrome
- All is the default episode filter and the first tab; Unread, Downloaded and Flagged follow. Opening a feed and seeing nothing because everything in it was read is a poor first impression.
- OPML import/export moved into Settings, under a Subscriptions heading, and the OPML button is gone from the sidebar -- it is a thing you do once in a while, not a daily control.
- The feed actions are pills with icons, and Unsubscribe is pushed to the far end in a quiet style: it sat next to Settings looking exactly like it, one slip away from losing a feed.
2026-09-10 — Phone layout
The UI was unusable on a phone, starting with the worst of it: the ☰ button lived inside the player bar, which is hidden until something plays, so there was no way to reach the feed list at all. It now sits in a small bar at the top of the main pane that is always there, and the sidebar slides over the page with a scrim to tap away.
The rest:
- One pane at a time. The three-pane split becomes a list, with the item text taking the whole
screen over it and a
← Episodesbutton back. The divider is hidden. - No sideways scrolling. A grid column is min-content wide by default, so one long headline
("davewiner/hackerNewsStars") dragged the entire page off the right edge --
min-width:0down the shell/main/wrap chain,overflow-wrap:anywhereon headings, and an explicitminmax(0,1fr)column for the OPML child list. - The player stacks: title row on top, transport and seek bar below, and it paints above the reading pane so it stays reachable.
- Header artwork, buttons and log rows shrink to fit; tap targets go to 38px.
A Playwright case at 390x844 locks in the three things that actually broke: the burger is visible with nothing playing, the page does not scroll sideways, and an item opens and closes over the list.
2026-09-10 — Marking a subscription read
An OPML subscription's page now has Mark all read, sitting where every other feed keeps it --
before Unsubscribe. The fix is in the handler rather than the button: read-all resolves the feeds
whose group is the given id (through subscriptions(), so a child promoted to config counts too)
and marks those, since the subscription's own row holds no entries and marking it did nothing.
2026-09-10 — A folder counts what it holds
An OPML subscription has no entries of its own, so its row always read 0 unread no matter how much
was waiting inside it. Unread and saved are now summed from the feeds it holds -- from all of them,
not just the ones a search filter left showing, so the number doesn't move as you type. The badge
caps at 999+ (the real figure is in its tooltip); a four-digit count ate the title beside it.
2026-09-10 — Sidebar alignment
The feed list had four different left edges: a row with no children skipped the chevron entirely, so its artwork sat a chevron-width left of a folder's; children then used a different indent and a smaller icon. Nothing lined up with anything.
Every row now reserves the chevron slot whether or not it opens (an empty one is
pointer-events:none, so the click falls through to the row), all artwork is one size, and nesting
reads from the indent alone. Both label lines are display:block on a shared line-height instead of
an inline baseline, and the unread count has a min-width so three-digit feeds don't shove the
title. Rows came out shorter, so more feeds fit without scrolling.
2026-09-10 — An item's picture
An item's artwork now resolves in order of how deliberate the source is: itunes:image, then Media
RSS media:thumbnail, then a media:content that declares itself an image, and finally an image
enclosure. That last one matters here -- Substack puts each article's header picture in an
<enclosure>, which is why those blog entries had no artwork despite carrying one all along. Audio
enclosures are never mistaken for pictures.
Backfilling needed the validators cleared first: record_entry fills a missing image on update, but
a 304 skips parsing entirely, so the feeds would have kept their blank squares. (The self-heal added
earlier only fires when a feed has zero entries, which was not the case here.)
Result across the library: 325 of 3470 entries now carry their own picture, 13 feeds where every entry has one, 69 feeds that publish no per-item image at all -- those fall back to the feed's artwork, which is the intended behaviour rather than a gap.
2026-09-10 — Database cleanup, and the 304 trap it walked into
Cleaned up on request: removed the CT Log Archive Torrents folder (123 preallocated files from the
abandoned 1.6 TB tuscolo torrent, 19 GB real on disk, no row referencing any of it, feed no
longer subscribed), the unsubscribed ct-log feed's rows, and every OPML-derived entry/enclosure that
held no file so a rescan could rebuild them with the current parser. Kept every row holding a file,
so nothing on disk was orphaned, and kept the skipped/reaped history, without which the next scan
would re-download the 149 images just deleted. Disk 22 GB -> 3.8 GB, database 22.8 MB -> 5.2 MB.
Correction worth recording: mid-download I checked that torrent folder, saw du -sh report 8 KB,
and told Ray it was sparse with nothing written. By the time it was abandoned it had allocated 19 GB.
The reassurance had a shelf life I did not mention.
Then "Abort Retry Fail is empty". The cleanup deleted entries but left each feed's ETag/Last-Modified. The rescan sent them, servers answered 304 (120 times in the log), the daemon skipped parsing, and 57 feeds stayed empty -- and would have until a publisher happened to change something. Cleared the validators on the empty feeds and rescanned: entries 1524 -> 3009, feeds with content 19 -> 64, Abort Retry Fail back to 20.
Fixed in code so it cannot recur: a 304 arriving while the feed has zero stored entries means the validator has outlived the data -- a restore, a manual edit, a cleanup. The daemon now believes the database over the validator, drops it and asks again. Proved live by deleting a feed's entries, leaving its ETag, and rescanning: 20 entries rebuilt, self-heal logged once.
"not a wanted media type" was internal jargon reaching the UI, and it was stored in last_error
so an ordinary filter decision rendered in red as though something had failed. Reworded to "not
audio or video", 144 existing rows updated, and the UI now paints a reason red only when the state
is actually error.
2026-09-10 — Multiple enclosures per item, and viewing without downloading
View without downloading. A non-audio/video enclosure now carries a View link opening in a new
tab: the publisher's own URL when nothing is downloaded, the local copy at /media/<id> when it is.
Deliberately a direct link rather than a proxy — relaying arbitrary URLs through the daemon would
make it a fetch-anything service.
Multiple enclosures. Probed before assuming, and the result was worse than expected: the rss
crate models an item as having at most one enclosure (which is what RSS 2.0 says) and when a feed
carries several it silently keeps the last, dropping the rest. So a two-file item lost its first
file entirely.
enclosures_by_item() reads them straight from the XML with quick-xml, in document order,
unescaping attribute values — a feed URL's & arrives as &, so skipping that would corrupt
every query string. It falls back to the parsed enclosure if the scan and the parser disagree on
item count. Atom already collected all rel="enclosure" links. The row now summarises the enclosure
you would act on (playable, else downloaded, else first) and says "+N more files"; the pane below
lists them all.
A real limitation surfaced by a broken fixture. Two browser tests failed with zero enclosures in
the detail pane. Not the new scanner — verified by running it against the fixture files directly,
which was right every time. The cause: my fixtures pointed two feeds at the same enclosure URL,
and enclosures.url is UNIQUE across the whole database, so whichever feed is scanned first claims
it and the other's entry gets nothing. That is the dedupe working as designed, but it means two
feeds legitimately sharing a media URL will only ever show it under one of them — worth knowing,
and worth revisiting if a network feed and a show feed ever overlap.
2026-09-10 — A file is not the same as a playable file
Reported: "Abort Retry Fail still shows downloaded and audio playback UI". The media-type filter
stopped new image enclosures being fetched, but those 20 JPEGs were already on disk from before
it existed — and the UI gave a play button and an <audio> element to anything with a path. An
audio element pointed at a JPEG is just a broken player.
isPlayable() now separates having a file from being playable: audio/* or video/*, falling back to
the file extension when a feed declares no type. Four places used the wrong test — the row's play
button, the artwork's play overlay, encBox, and play() itself, which picked the first downloaded
enclosure regardless of what it was. A downloaded non-media file now shows as
image · downloaded · Save · Delete file, so it is still there and still retrievable, just not
pretending to be an episode.
Covered by a new browser test with a fixture blog whose entry carries a JPEG enclosure and a feed
configured to download it: no play button on the row, no <audio> in the detail pane, and the Save
button still present.
2026-09-10 — Three-pane layout
Ray asked for feeds beside, items above, and the selected item's text with its enclosures below — the layout iPodderX used. Went looking for a screenshot to work from: the archived ipodderx.com kept only marketing panels and 130px feature icons, no full window, and the review screenshots lived on MacMerc which the archive query did not surface. Said so rather than pretending to have reference art; the description is a precise spec on its own.
#split is a grid of list / divider / detail. Selecting a row no longer expands it inline — it
highlights and fills the pane below with the title, metadata, read/keep buttons, the sanitized notes
and one block per enclosure (a player when the file is here, otherwise what it is and a Download
button). The divider drags, and the split is remembered in localStorage. The OPML group page keeps
the old scrolling layout via a plain class.
Process note, because it cost a dozen calls. Four anchor-patches in a row failed on text I had
guessed rather than read: return el not return div, open:new Set() mid-line rather than
starting one. Each assert aborted before writing, so the file kept reverting to a half-applied
state, and one earlier patch did land while broken and left a syntax error. What worked was
reverting to the committed copy and then reading each block verbatim before touching it, with regex
for the whitespace-sensitive parts.
The suite paid for itself again: the new pane test failed on #detail audio because
max_new_per_check = 1 plus newest-first means the daemon fetches Second Episode, so First has no
player. My assumption, not a bug — the same mistake as the earlier S1E1 one. The test now finds
the downloaded row by its chip instead of assuming which episode it is. 9 browser tests pass.
2026-09-10 — Image enclosures were being treated as episodes
Reported as "Abort Retry Fail shows downloads but there are none". It had 20 enclosures, all
image/jpeg: Substack puts each article's header image in the RSS <enclosure> tag, so ipx
downloaded 20 JPEGs and counted them as episodes. Across the OPML subscription: 149 images, 74 MB,
11 feeds.
[general] media_types defaults to ["audio", "video"], with a per-feed override. An enclosure
whose top-level type is not wanted is recorded and shown but not auto-downloaded.
Clarified mid-change: those enclosures should still be visible, just not fetched automatically. So nothing is hidden — the row names what it is ("image", "pdf", "torrent") instead of a bare "skipped", and the download button still works if you want that file.
Two judgement calls in wanted_media: an unknown or absent type is allowed, because the real
type is only known after downloading and refusing everything untyped would drop feeds that simply
omit the attribute; and a torrent is allowed, being a container rather than media, judged once
unpacked.
The enclosure-less case Ray also described was already correct — every download affordance in the row is gated on the enclosure existing. Checked before changing anything.
2026-09-10 — Daemon I/O log tab, and Playwright
Log tabs. All / Daemon I/O / Scans / HTTP. "Daemon I/O" is the control protocol itself: every
command arriving (-> {"cmd":...}) and every event leaving (<- {"ev":...}), logged under
ipx::io at the one point every command funnels through, so it catches socket clients, the CLI
proxying and the web UI alike. Rendered in that tab as in/out rather than level+target.
The two logging destinations now have separate filters: stderr follows IPX_LOG (default
ipx=info), the in-app buffer follows IPX_UI_LOG (default ipx=debug) and holds 5000 lines. The
UI can therefore show protocol traffic and routine skips that would be noise on a terminal.
Playwright. npm install plus npx playwright install --with-deps chromium, added to
/src/install.sh. playwright.config.js starts a fixture feed server and a daemon on a scratch
config, and eight tests drive a real browser. Each maps to a bug that actually reached Ray.
Two things the harness taught, both worth keeping:
- Playwright starts
webServerbeforeglobalSetup. Writing the scratch config in globalSetup meant the daemon launched with no config, fell back to defaults, and tried to seize the live daemon's socket. The config is written at config-load time instead. - Ports 8097/8771 looked free but
ssshowed 8097 held by a process outside this container (shared host network). Moved to 8791/8792.
The suite found a real bug on its first green-ish run: OPML folders rendered expanded by
default. The code stored the set of closed groups, so a folder never toggled — every folder in a
fresh browser — counted as open, the exact opposite of the comment above it. It stores the open ones
now. Two other failures were my tests' fault, not the code's: asserting S1E1 on .ep.first() when
newest-first put a different episode there, and an unscoped getByText matching both the sidebar
entry and the page heading. The SE in that first failure was the artwork placeholder's initials,
which I nearly misread as a broken chip.
2026-09-10 — Regression: derived feeds looked "unsubscribed" to half the code
Reported as error: enclosure 235 belongs to unsubscribed feed "abort-retry-fail". Moving OPML
feeds out of config.toml meant a config-only lookup no longer finds them, and download_one still
did exactly that — so Download on any episode from an OPML subscription failed outright.
Worse than the one bug: my first grep for the pattern gave false confidence. grep -n 'cfg\.feeds\.get' returned three hits, all legitimate, so it looked clean — but the failing call
was split across lines, cfg then .feeds then .get, and never matched. Re-searching with
newlines collapsed found sixteen .feeds accesses, several of them wrong:
download_one— the reported failure.Statusand the daemon's startup line counted config feeds only: 3 reported where there are 85.adddeduped and slugged against config only, so adding a URL an OPML already lists would have duplicated it, and a new feed could collide with a derived feed's id.rmon a derived feed said "no feed with id".- The web add endpoint had the same duplicate hole.
All now go through subscriptions(). Verified against the exact failure: enclosure 235 went
pending -> done.
Lesson recorded because it will recur: when a lookup moves, a single-line grep is not a survey. Collapse newlines before searching Rust method chains.
2026-09-10 — OPML feeds out of the config, a real cap, and daemon output in the log
Three reports in quick succession, all fair.
"Config is a mess." It was: 611 lines, 85 feeds, 82 of them machine-generated, drowning the three
Ray actually chose. Writing derived data into a hand-edited file was the wrong call. OPML children
now live in the feeds table (managed = 1, group_id), are re-derived every scan, and inherit the
subscription's settings — so there is nothing to store but a URL and a parent. Editing one promotes
it to a real config entry, so config.toml only ever holds decisions. A one-time migration moves
existing children out: 611 lines -> 38, 85 feeds -> 3, with all 3487 entries and 216 files intact.
"Never download more than 3." max_new_per_check defaulted to unlimited, so subscribing to an
OPML of 82 feeds pulled every back catalogue it could reach — 216 files, 22 GB before it was caught.
There is now [general] max_new_per_check = 3, used whenever a feed does not set its own, so all 83
uncapped feeds were capped without touching a line of their config. pending() also orders by publish
date now: a cap of 3 meant "the three recorded first", not the three newest.
"No daemon output in the log." Scans and downloads travel as events to the socket, not through
tracing, so the log view showed only startup and HTTP lines. Emitter::emit mirrors them now — and
levelling matters at this scale: at 82 feeds, one INFO line per feed per tick for "not due yet"
flushed the 2000-line buffer of anything useful in minutes, so routine skips and progress are DEBUG,
real activity is INFO, failures WARN.
A splice while refactoring cut reject and fetch_one out of main.rs, and recovering them from git
over-copied three more. Both caught by the compiler, restored, and verified byte-identical against
git show HEAD:src/main.rs rather than eyeballed.
2026-09-10 — Subscribing to an OPML, not just importing one
Asked whether this version could do what iPodderX did: subscribe to an OPML and get a folder of the
feeds inside it. It could not — ipx import was one-shot from a file and nothing ever re-read it.
The original checked for a URL ending in .opml and re-fetched it on every scan
(iPXClass.py:34-40).
Now: a feed whose body sniffs as OPML is a subscription list. Sniffing the body rather than the URL
extension also catches an OPML served from a .rss or extension-less URL, which the original missed.
Every scan re-reads it; listed feeds become real config entries with group = "<opml-id>" inheriting
the parent's settings, land in one nested folder, and are scanned in the same run rather than waiting
an interval.
Removal policy, Ray's rule: a downloaded file is never orphaned. Gone from the OPML with nothing
downloaded -> unsubscribed and removed. Gone but with downloads -> kept and flagged orphaned, with
the UI saying why. Verified end to end on a local fixture: the feed with 1 download was kept and
flagged, the one with 0 was removed, the file untouched.
folder_for had to change: it sanitized the whole folder string, so sub/Show would have collapsed
into one directory. Each path segment is sanitized separately now, with a test that ../../etc/Show
cannot climb out of the download directory.
Also: Db::memory() now runs migrate() like a real open. It did not, so a column added only in the
migration passed the tests while being absent in production — which is exactly backwards.
Live result: Ray's lists.opml.org subscription expanded into 82 child feeds, all grouped, 1431
entries, no feed errors, worker still responsive mid-scan.
2026-09-10 — Log view in the app, and Docker
Log view. A ring buffer (2000 lines) fed by a tracing layer, exposed at /api/logs with a
sequence cursor so the UI polls for "everything after N" without duplicates. Tailing a file was the
obvious approach and the wrong one: under Docker the logs go to stdout and there is no file. An
access_log middleware adds a line per HTTP request, so the daemon and the web side share one
stream — which is what Ray asked for. That middleware skips /api/logs itself, or the panel's
2-second poll would generate a line per poll forever, a log of nothing but its own requests.
UI: sidebar Log button, level and text filters, follow-tail toggle, copy button, colour-coded levels.
Restart safety. Detached torrents introduced a downloading state, and a row left in it by a
restart would sit there forever — the pending queue skips it and nothing else revisits it.
requeue_interrupted() resets those at startup, leaving alone any row that already has a file.
Docker. Multi-stage build (deps cached separately from source), debian:bookworm-slim runtime,
114 MB. Entrypoint writes a starter config bound to 0.0.0.0 on first run, because a container's
loopback is unreachable from outside, and drops to PUID:PGID via gosu. Healthcheck is
ipx status, which goes through the control socket to the worker and so catches a wedged daemon,
not just a dead one.
Built and actually run, not just written: image builds, container starts, writes its config, serves
the UI (401 without a token, 200 with), /api/logs answers, and the process runs as
uid=99(ipx) gid=100(users) with files owned 99:100 and the token file at mode 600.
Worth noting for future testing here: this session's Docker socket belongs to the Unraid host, so
-v /tmp/...:/config binds a path on the host, not one visible from inside this container. The
mount looks empty from here while being perfectly correct — verify inside the container instead.
2026-09-10 — Torrents: they work, and one was freezing the whole daemon
Asked "is torrents working?". The honest answer had been "unverified since step 7" — so it got tested properly.
They work. End to end against a real swarm: Debian 13.6.0 netinst, 791,674,880 bytes, completed,
file confirms a bootable ISO, row marked done. Metadata resolution, transfer, placement and
completion all good.
But the daemon was wedged. Ray's CT-log feed had 47 pending torrents and nothing was progressing.
The worker was blocked: a status command over the control socket got no reply in 15s. Torrents ran
inline on the single command worker, so one torrent stopped every feed scan, every HTTP download
and every status command behind it — for up to stall_mins (30 default) waiting on metadata, and
worse, Torrents::fetch blocks on seeding for up to seed_time_mins (60 default) after
finishing. One successful torrent could have frozen podcast fetching for an hour.
Torrents are now detached: spawn_torrent runs the job on its own task behind a 2-permit semaphore,
the row is marked downloading so a rescan does not queue it twice, and the worker moves straight
on. A one-shot CLI run still runs them inline, or the process would exit mid-download. Verified: the
worker now answers status in 0.0s.
A diagnostic misstep worth recording: /api/settings returning 200 was taken as proof the worker was
alive. It is not — the web server is a separate task, so HTTP stays responsive while the queue is
completely stuck. Probing the control socket is the real test.
Those CT-log torrents are ~557 GB each, 47 of them. The RSS advertises length="0", so nothing
warns you; the size only appears once metadata resolves. auto_download on that feed is set to
false as a hold, since restarting would otherwise have begun a half-terabyte transfer immediately
(the scheduler's first tick fires at startup). Flip it back in the feed's Settings when wanted.
Also noted: an aborted torrent leaves librqbit's pre-created file placeholders behind in the destination folder (zero-length). Not cleaned up yet.
2026-09-10 — Schedule pickers, and progress painting every row
Pickers. "Check feeds every" is a number input plus a unit dropdown (minutes/hours/days/weeks)
in both global and per-feed Settings, replacing free text. parse_interval gained weeks first — it
only knew m/h/d, so the backend would have rejected the new option. The per-feed dropdown's first
entry is "Use the default — every N", which disables the number and sends null; that rides on the
null-clearing path fixed earlier today, and would not have worked before it. splitEvery picks the
largest unit that divides evenly, so 120 reads "2 hours" rather than "120 min". The API now returns
schedule_mins so the page does not re-implement the parser.
Bug: one download painted every pending row's progress bar. Reported after adding the TWiT feed.
The progress event carried feed/url/file but no enclosure id, so the handler had nothing to target
and set the width on all of them — the code even carried a comment admitting it applied "to whatever
is downloading now". Adding a feed therefore looked like it was downloading the entire back
catalogue.
Event::Progress, DownloadDone and DownloadError now carry enclosure, threaded through both
the HTTP and torrent paths (db::Pending gained its row id to make that possible), and the handler
targets .dlbar[data-bar="<id>"] alone. A test asserts the id is on the wire. Idle bars are
transparent and only get a track while live, so a row that is not downloading shows nothing.
tests/page-smoke.js also drives each modal with live-shaped data now — load-time smoke never
reaches code that only runs when a dialog opens, which is exactly where these changes landed.
Verified live: weeks round-trips (every 2w -> 20160 min), both pickers render, clearing an
override returns to the global default. cargo test 37/37.
2026-09-10 — The whole UI was dead, and server-side tests could not see it
Reported as "my feeds seem to have disappeared", then "settings and dark/light mode don't do anything either". One cause for all three.
$('#prefs').onclick = prefsModal referenced a function that did not exist. An uncaught
ReferenceError stops the entire script, and that line sits above the theme toggle, the feed
filter, the SSE connection and the loadFeeds() call that fills the sidebar — so everything below
it silently never ran.
Cause: a patch anchored on something already deleted. The scheduling UI was inserted with
str.replace anchored on function toggleSettings(){, which belonged to the old basic UI that
the full rewrite had already removed. Python's replace matches nothing and says nothing, and there
was no assert — so prefsModal, everyText, due and globalEvery were never added, while the
line calling prefsModal went in fine via a different anchor that did match.
Why it got through. Every check was server-side: curl for status codes, JSON shape, config
contents. All passed, because the server was fine. node --check also passed — it parses, and a
ReferenceError is a runtime failure. The page was never executed.
tests/page-smoke.js now runs the real page script against a stub DOM, fails on anything thrown,
and flags handlers wired to elements that do not exist. Confirmed non-vacuous by reintroducing the
exact bug: exit 1 pointing at the offending line, clean once restored. Run it with
node tests/page-smoke.js.
Wiring is also defensive now — on(sel, ev, fn) logs and skips rather than throwing, so one dead
reference cannot blank the app again.
2026-09-10 — Scheduling, and two bugs it uncovered
Scheduling. The original engine had none — it only skipped feeds on <ttl>; the schedule lived
in the Cocoa GUI that was never open-sourced, so there was no original behaviour to match. Scope
agreed with Ray: interval only, global default plus per-feed override, no quiet hours.
general.schedule takes "every 30m", "every 4h", "1d", or a bare number of minutes;
feeds.<id>.schedule overrides it. The legacy interval_mins is still read so existing configs
work, and saving from the UI migrates it. A malformed value in the file warns and falls back rather
than stopping the daemon; a malformed value over the API is a 400.
Precedence, which is a judgement call: an explicit per-feed schedule wins outright, including over
the publisher's <ttl>. With no per-feed schedule, <ttl> still raises the interval when the
publisher asks to be polled less often. Visible in practice — TWiT resolves to 720 min from its own
ttl against a 60 min global.
UI: a gear opens global Settings (schedule, quota, max age); each feed's Settings gains a schedule field; the feed header shows "every 4 hours · next in 37m".
Bug 1: null never cleared anything. For Option<Option<T>>, serde maps JSON null onto the
outer None, which the handler reads as "field absent, leave alone" — so Some(None) was
unreachable and every clear was a no-op returning 204. That silently affected folder, schedule
and max_new_per_check; unsetting any of them from the UI did nothing and looked like it worked.
Fixed with a double_option deserializer, and pinned by a test covering absent / null / value.
Bug 2: the daemon ignored SIGTERM while working. tokio::select! races its branches only at
selection time; once inside run(...).await the shutdown future was not polled at all, so a signal
queued behind a 90 MB download. Under systemd every restart would have hit TimeoutStopSec and been
SIGKILLed mid-transfer.
This one cost real time: pkill appeared to work but didn't, a stale daemon kept port 8099, and
because the restart also rm -f'd the socket it defeated the "already listening" guard and a second
daemon started. Every PATCH "verified" after that went to the old binary — so bug 1 was reported
fixed while completely untested. Lesson: confirm the process actually died and the socket guard is
doing its job, rather than trusting the restart.
The stop signal now lives in a watch channel raced inside each job. Measured: SIGTERM mid-
download exits in 1s (was: blocked until the transfer finished). An abandoned download leaves a
partial in .ipx-incomplete, discarded on the next attempt.
cargo test 37/37.
2026-09-10 — App name, and a transparent icon
Title is iPodderX in the browser tab and the sidebar. The heading's text-transform: uppercase
had to go with it, or the camel case would have rendered as IPODDERX.
The icon's white background is gone. A blanket -transparent white would have punched holes
straight through the device, whose body is also white — so the background is flood-filled inward
from all four corners at 12% fuzz, which only clears the connected region and stops at the dark
outline. Then trimmed and scaled to 128px.
Checked by compositing onto the real #0e131b rather than trusting the alpha channel: no white
plate, and no pale fringe from the JPEG artifacts along the outline. The .logo rule lost its
background:#fff plate and switched to object-fit:contain.
Both files are tracked: ipodderx-icon.jpg is the untouched archival original, ipodderx-icon.png
the transparent version derived from it, so the provenance chain survives. The PNG is embedded as a
data URI for the sidebar mark and the favicon.
2026-09-10 — Colour scheme derived from the icon
Palette sampled from web/ipodderx-icon.jpg with ImageMagick rather than eyeballed. The icon gives
three families: the silver device ramp (#1A1A1A #606060 #929292 #ADADAD #D6D6D6 #F5F5F5),
the screen blues (#2D5391 #5574A9 #7595CA #92B2E6 #B4CAED), one amber from the EQ bars
(#F49E2C), and a blue-grey #95A0B1.
Dark theme: --bg is the screen navy taken right down, --fg the device highlight, --dim the
blue-grey verbatim, --accent the screen blue, --accent2 the amber. Light theme flips to the
device body — white panels, #D6D6D6 edges, #1A1A1A text — with the deeper #2D5391 as accent,
since the pale screen blue vanishes on white. Text sitting on an accent fill moved from a hardcoded
#0b0e14 to a --ink token.
Two calls: the amber doubles as the pending state, being the only warm note in the icon and exactly where the eye should go. And since the icon has no green or red, the downloaded/error colours are tuned to the palette's saturation and temperature rather than invented from scratch.
Contrast was checked, not assumed, and it failed first time. --faint — which carries dates,
durations and file sizes at small size — came out at 3.92 dark and 3.11 light, both under AA. Moved
along the icon's own grey ramp to #7a8799 and #767676. Every pair in both themes now clears
WCAG AA; the lowest anywhere is 4.54.
2026-09-10 — The real iPodderX icon
The sidebar mark was an invented ix placeholder. The original icon is not in this repo or the
legacy one: only the Python engine was open-sourced, never the Cocoa bundle whose Resources held the
.icns (the legacy repo's history contains nothing but .py/.so/.po/.mo/LICENSE/README).
Recovered from the Internet Archive's capture of ipodderx.com: _graphics/iPXicon.jpg, 173x165 --
the white iPod-style device with the antenna and EQ display. That is the largest surviving copy; the
site's 2005 favicon.ico is far too small to use. Saved as web/ipodderx-icon.jpg so the file lives
in the tree, and embedded as a base64 data URI (12.7 KB) for both the sidebar mark and the favicon,
which avoids an extra asset route.
.logo changed from a gradient chip to a white rounded tile, since the icon is photo-style on a
light ground.
Provenance is Ray's own: the app was Slakinski & Trometer / Thunderstone Media, and this is its successor.
2026-09-10 — Feed URL is editable, with a copy button
The URL in a feed's Settings is now an editable field paired with Copy. Entries and download history are keyed by feed id, not URL, so changing it keeps everything — which is the point, since a Patreon feed URL carries an auth token that gets rotated.
Two things that would otherwise have bitten:
navigator.clipboarddoes not exist here. It requires a secure context, and this is served over plain HTTP on a LAN address, so the button would have silently done nothing. Falls back to a hidden textarea plusexecCommand('copy'), and reports Copied/Failed either way.- Changing the URL clears the stored ETag/Last-Modified. Those validators belong to the old URL; carrying them over could yield a bogus 304 against the new one and make a working feed look empty.
check_url is a tested pure function: rejects empty, unparseable and non-http(s) URLs (so
file:///etc/passwd is refused), rejects a URL another feed already uses, and allows a feed to keep
its own URL unchanged. Validation failures and unknown feed ids now return 400, not 500 — bad
input is the caller's mistake, and only genuine server faults are logged as errors.
Verified live: the three rejection cases return 400 with readable messages, a no-op save returns 204,
and the feed still reports 131 entries / 11 downloaded. cargo test 34/34.
2026-09-10 — Fixed: pressing play made an episode vanish from the list
Reported as "where did Session Zero go, and why do parts share a number?".
Two separate things, one of them a real bug.
The bug. play() marked an episode read the moment playback started. The default view is the
Unread tab, so pressing play removed the episode from the list you were looking at — indistinguishable
from it going missing. Confirmed from the data: all four read entries had position = 0, meaning
playback never passed the 10-second save threshold. They had been started, never listened to.
Marking read now happens when an episode is actually consumed — on ended, or once playback passes
90% — never on play. Two earlier PROGRESS entries described mark-on-play as a deliberate feature;
it was a design error, and this supersedes them.
Also restored the four affected rows to unread, since their read flag was purely an artifact of the
bug (UPDATE entries SET read=0 WHERE read=1 AND position=0 — no genuinely-played episode could
match, since playing one writes a position).
Not a bug: repeated episode numbers. Each story part ships as two items — the main episode and a
shorter Junk in the Trunk companion — with distinct GUIDs, durations and files, and the publisher
gives both the same itunes:episode. Zero duplicated titles across all 131 entries. Session Zero
additionally carries a season with no episode number and drops the "Part N" naming, so it does not
match the pattern its siblings follow.
Verified: the arc shows 11/11 items under the default Unread view again.
2026-09-10 — Titles: RSS <title> is the only source
Confirmed against the live feed rather than assumed: 131 feed items, 131 stored, 0 mismatches —
entry titles are byte-for-byte what the RSS <title> publishes, separators included. feed.rs never
consults itunes:title, and season/episode live in their own columns, rendered as chips rather than
folded into the title.
Pinned with a test: a fixture whose itunes:title differs from its <title> must still yield the
RSS title, and an item with itunes:season but no itunes:episode keeps a null episode instead of
inventing one.
That null-episode case is real in the wild — this feed's Music from a Darkened Room | Session Zero
carries S8 with no episode number, while Parts 1-5 get E1-E5, and it drops the "Part N" convention
its siblings use. The arc is 11 items: Session Zero plus five parts, each part being a main episode
and its shorter Junk in the Trunk companion.
2026-09-10 — Phase 3: full-featured UI
Rewrite of web/index.html (~714 lines) plus the backend it needed.
New stored metadata, all of which the real feed carries on all 131 episodes and none of which
was being captured: feed and per-episode artwork (itunes:image), duration (itunes:duration,
parsed from either raw seconds or a 1:34:09 clock), season/episode numbers, and a playback
position so episodes resume.
Schema migration. Db::open now runs migrate(): PRAGMA table_info then ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN for anything missing, since CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS does nothing to an existing table.
Tested on a copy of the live database first. Accidentally SIGPIPE'd it partway through (a head -4
on the output) which usefully proved it is idempotent and self-heals: the next run added the
remaining columns, 131 entries and 6 downloads intact.
New endpoints: entry filters (all/unread/downloaded/flagged), case-insensitive search over title
and notes, pagination totals, POST .../position, read-all, download-latest, and OPML
import/export over HTTP.
UI: persistent player bar surviving navigation (play/pause, ±15s/30s, 0.8-2.5x speed, volume,
scrubber, all remembered in localStorage), resume playback via sendBeacon every 10s, MediaSession
for lock-screen controls, keyboard shortcuts (space, arrows, /, Esc), artwork everywhere with
generated-initials fallback, filter tabs, episode search, load-more pagination, live progress bars
off SSE, real modals, toasts, light/dark toggle, and a mobile layout with a collapsing sidebar.
Bug found and fixed in review: filtering was broken while searching worked. count_entries
dropped the search clause when no term was given but still bound ?2; rusqlite rejects a parameter
the statement never mentions -- "Wrong number of parameters passed to query. Got 2, needed 1". So
?q=... worked and a plain Unread/Downloaded/Flagged filter 500'd. The clause is now always present
with ?2 = '' short-circuiting it. Regression test runs all four filters with and without a search
term and asserts the page and the count agree.
A non-bug worth recording: artwork looked broken on the live DB (0/131) while a fresh DB filled
all 131. The parser was fine -- the live DB simply had not been rescanned yet, since backfill happens
through record_entry's update path. After a forced scan: 131/131 image, duration and season.
Verified live: all four filters return sane totals (131/129/10/0), search works (session zero -> 2,
trunk -> 10), /media/1 with a Range header returns 206, index serves 34 KB. cargo test 32/32.
2026-09-10 — Fixed: the UI's Download button downloaded the wrong episodes
Reported from the running instance: clicking Download on Music from a Darkened Room | Session Zero
showed progress, then left the episode at pending.
Cause, and it was a design error in step 11, not a glitch. POST /api/enclosures/{id}/download
requeued the row to pending and asked for an ordinary scan, justified at the time as "needed no
new machinery — the queue is the table". But a scan means take the lowest-id pending rows, up to
max_new_per_check. Against a 125-item backlog with a cap of 2, that is ids 7 and 8; the requested
row 11 was never a candidate. The progress on screen was two other episodes downloading past it.
The queue can express what is outstanding but not what was asked for. Command::Download { enclosure } is now its own command: it fetches that one row immediately, ignoring both queue order
and the per-scan cap, still through the single worker so it cannot overlap a scan. Torrent
enclosures route to torrent_one the same way a scan would.
Verified live: enclosure 11 went pending -> done, 90.3 MB on disk, and nothing else was pulled
in its place. cargo test 30/30, with the new command's wire form pinned.
Worth remembering: the daemon scans immediately on its first tick, so every restart costs
max_new_per_check episodes on the normal path.
2026-09-10 — Phase 2: web front end (steps 9-13)
axum in the daemon process, plain HTML/JS in web/index.html (embedded with include_str!), no
WASM toolchain. One binary still.
Config hot-reload. Ctx.cfg is now RwLock<Arc<Config>>; ctx.cfg() hands out a snapshot, so
no guard is ever held across an await. The UI rewrites config.toml and calls reload_cfg, and a
running daemon picks the change up on its next scan. The CLI mutation commands (add/rm/import)
now clone a snapshot, edit, and save.
Auth. [web] enabled/bind/token; the token is minted from /dev/urandom on first run, written
back to config.toml, and the URL printed. ?token= sets a year-long cookie — it has to be a cookie
because an <audio> element cannot send a header. Comparison is constant-time. An empty token makes
the server refuse to serve rather than serve open.
Endpoints. /api/feeds (GET/POST), /api/feeds/{id} (PATCH/DELETE),
/api/feeds/{id}/entries, /api/entries/{feed}/{guid}/flags, /api/enclosures/{id}/download,
/api/enclosures/{id} (DELETE), /api/fetch, /api/events (SSE off the existing broadcast bus),
/media/{id} (tower-http ServeFile, so Range works).
read/flagged finally have a writer — the UI sets them, and playing an episode marks it read.
Retention has ordered by these since step 5 with nothing to set them.
Download-on-demand needed no new machinery: requeue the row to pending and kick a scan, since
the queue is the table. That also un-skips an enclosure a filter rejected under older settings.
Verified against the live Glass Cannon feed, daemon on 127.0.0.1:8749:
- auth: no token 401, wrong token 401, right token 200 + cookie, API then works on the cookie alone;
/media/1unauthenticated is 401. - browsing: 131 entries page with enclosures attached.
- XSS: injected
<script>alert(1)</script><img src=x onerror=alert(2)>into a stored description; it reaches the page as<p>hi</p><img src="x">— script tag and handler both gone. - media: 200 with
accept-ranges: bytes;Range: bytes=1000000-1000999returns 206 with the rightcontent-range, so seeking works. - config: PATCH -> 204, written to config.toml, and the running daemon reports the new values with no restart.
- SSE: 105 events for one download (101 progress), then
download_done/feed_done/scan_done. - flags: 204, unread count dropped 131 -> 130. Delete: file gone, row
reaped/path=NULL.
cargo test 30/30.
Caveats. It is plain HTTP — on a LAN bind the token crosses the network in the clear, and a feed
URL may itself carry a credential (Patreon's does), which the /api/feeds response includes. A
reverse proxy with TLS is the answer if that matters. There is no per-user anything; the token is
all-or-nothing access.
2026-09-10 — Tested against a real feed (Patreon / Glass Cannon)
First run against a live subscriber feed: 131 items, 6.17 GB total, all audio/mpeg, no <ttl>.
Parsed clean, titled Get in the Trunk | Anthology Series | Delta Green, downloaded a valid MP3
(file confirms ID3v2.3, MPEG layer III). A second scan pulled the next episode, confirming
max_new_per_check defers rather than drops. Over the socket: 101 progress events for a 79 MB
episode -- whole-percent throttling behaving exactly as intended -- then download_done,
feed_done, scan_done.
Fixed: stripped separators left doubled spaces. The feed title separates words with |, a
forbidden filename character, so the folder came out Get in the Trunk Anthology Series Delta Green. The Python had the same wart.
Forbidden characters are now split in two. Separators (/ \\ | :) become -; the rest
(? * < > " ') are simply dropped. A run of dashes and spaces then collapses to " - " when the
run contained whitespace and to a bare - when it did not, so:
| input | output |
|---|---|
Get in the Trunk | Anthology Series | Delta Green |
Get in the Trunk - Anthology Series - Delta Green |
Ep 12: The One |
Ep 12 - The One |
AC/DC |
AC-DC |
well-known.mp3 |
well-known.mp3 |
../../etc/passwd |
etc-passwd |
Leading dashes and dots are trimmed too -- a filename starting with - trips up CLI tools.
Worth knowing, not a bug:
- The channel-level
itunes:explicitistrue, so with the defaultallow_explicit = falseall 131 episodes are skipped. Because filter verdicts are recorded once at discovery, flipping the setting afterwards does not re-evaluate enclosures already markedskipped-- they would need aUPDATE enclosures SET state='pending'. Worth aipx retry <feed>command if this bites. - Patreon sends neither
etagnorlast-modifiedon a GET (alast-modifieddoes appear on HEAD, which is what made it look briefly like a storage bug). So this feed can never 304: every poll re-fetches ~160 KB and re-parses 131 entries, andinterval_minsis the only thing limiting the rate. Cheap, but it means conditional GET buys nothing here.
2026-09-09 — Step 8: OPML and polish
ipx add <url> fetches the feed to name it from its own title (Accidental Tech Podcast ->
accidental-tech-podcast); a feed that cannot be reached is still added, named from its URL, rather
than refused. ipx rm leaves downloads and history alone, so re-adding a feed does not re-pull its
back catalogue. ipx import/export walk nested OPML folder outlines and skip URLs already
subscribed. tracing logs to stderr, IPX_LOG sets the filter. contrib/ has a systemd user unit
for the daemon, plus a timer and one-shot service for the no-daemon style (with the caveat that
without a daemon there is no socket for a UI).
Verified: cargo test 27/27. Round-trip — exported 3 feeds with real titles, removed one,
re-imported: exactly the missing one came back, no duplicates, config still mode 0600. Quickstart
from a genuinely empty home with no env overrides: list on a missing config, add, fetch
(1 downloaded, 1 explicit skipped, 1 torrent 404), list; every path resolved under $HOME.
2026-09-09 — Step 7: torrent.rs
src/torrent.rs: a librqbit Session started lazily on first torrent (binding ports and starting a
DHT for a config that has never seen a torrent would be rude). .torrent URLs and magnets both go
through AddTorrent::from_url. Progress is polled once a second and reported through the same
Progress events HTTP downloads use.
Downloads go straight into the feed folder rather than staging and moving. The plan said move then seed, which cannot work — seeding serves the files it downloaded, so moving them first breaks it. In-place also removes a copy the original had to do.
Seeding stops at seed_ratio or seed_time_mins, whichever comes first, then the torrent is
released from the session (files kept).
Bug the smoke test caught: the stall budget only covered the download loop, but resolving a
magnet's metadata happens inside add_torrent, which against a dead swarm never returns — a
torrent nobody seeds wedged the scan indefinitely. add_torrent is now wrapped in the same budget.
Verified: cargo test 27/27 (ratio incl. the divide-by-zero case, stall_mins = 0 not meaning
"abort instantly"). Routing: with enabled = false a torrent enclosure is marked
skipped/torrents disabled and never attempted. Session startup works here. Stall abort measured
end to end: with stall_mins = 1, a dead magnet failed at 20:58:23 -> 20:59:24, exactly 61s, and
the row recorded error / no metadata after 1 minutes, gave up.
Not verified: an actual successful swarm download. This sandbox has no reachable peers, so smoke 5's happy path — payload lands, seeding stops at the ratio — has not been run. The code paths either side of it are tested; the swarm itself needs a real network. Worth running once against a live torrent feed before trusting it.
2026-09-09 — Step 6: ipc.rs + daemon
src/ipc.rs: Event and Command as serde-tagged enums ({"ev":...} / {"cmd":...}), one JSON
object per line over a Unix socket. Emitter is the single output path — it broadcasts to socket
clients, prints the human rendering to a terminal, or both, so the scan code no longer knows how it
is being watched. That replaces printMSG and its ;;1;;1;;100.00;;42.31 sentinels.
main.rs restructured around a Ctx (config, db, client, emitter). ipx daemon binds the socket,
serves clients, and runs a 60s ticker that defers to each feed's TTL. Commands from every client
funnel through one mpsc queue into a single worker, which is what stops two scans overlapping.
Any CLI subcommand with a wire form probes the socket first and proxies to a running daemon;
--local forces the work to happen in-process. SIGINT/SIGTERM remove the socket on the way out.
Bug the smoke test caught: fetch runs a retention sweep first, and that sweep was emitting the
terminal ReapDone. A UI waiting for its fetch to finish would have stopped reading before the scan
started. Only a standalone ipx reap emits it now.
Verified: cargo test 24/24. Smoke 3 in full — daemon starts and binds; a raw socket client sending
{"cmd":"fetch","force":true} gets feed_start → 14 throttled progress events → download_done
→ feed_done → scan_done; {"cmd":"status"} answers {"ev":"status","feeds":1,...}. With the
daemon up, ipx fetch from the CLI logged command from a client cmd=Fetch { .. } in the daemon
and rendered the streamed events, so it proxied rather than downloading in parallel. Socket removed
on SIGTERM; with no daemon the same command runs locally.
Deferred: {"cmd":"cancel","enclosure":N} from the plan's protocol is not implemented —
downloads run sequentially in one worker, so there is nothing to cancel concurrently yet. It wants
a per-download cancellation token, which is worth doing when downloads go parallel. Say if you want
it sooner.
Note: the event stream is a broadcast, so a CLI client seeing a busy daemon also sees that other work. Fine for a terminal; a UI wanting strict request/response would want per-request ids.
Also note: the daemon reads config once at startup — changing config.toml needs a restart.
Next: step 7 — torrent.rs.
2026-09-09 — Step 5: retention.rs
src/retention.rs: reconcile pass (rows claiming a file that is gone become reaped, fixing the
step-4 wart), age sweep, quota sweep keeping the original's 50 MB headroom pad, and entry pruning.
ipx reap [--dry-run]; a sweep also runs before every fetch, as the Python did per download.
pick() and aged() are pure so the ordering rules are testable without touching a disk.
Judgement call worth Ray's eye. The Python meant to reap only read = 1 AND flagged = 0 but
never managed it — a missing plistlib import and an EntreiesData typo made that filter throw on
every candidate, so with a .ipxd present nothing was ever deleted. Requiring read = 1 here would
be equally dead, because nothing marks episodes read until a UI exists. So: flagged is the
keep-forever marker, and read only decides what goes first (ORDER BY read DESC, downloaded_at ASC). Quota therefore actually reclaims space headless. Say the word if you would rather unread
episodes were never touched.
Second call: max_age_days deletes files older than the cutoff, not just fileless entries as the
plan's wording had it — "keep 30 days of episodes" is what the setting reads like on a NAS.
Verified: cargo test 21/21, including the two tests encoding the exact bug the Python had —
flagged files are never offered, and read sort ahead of unread. Smoke 6 with three 30 MB episodes
against a 0.1 GB quota (52.4 MB ceiling after the pad): dry run listed ep1+ep2 and deleted nothing
(3 files still on disk), the real run deleted exactly those two oldest, left ep3, flipped both rows
to reaped with path = NULL. A full re-parse with the conditional-GET headers cleared then
re-downloaded nothing.
Next: step 6 — ipc.rs + daemon.
2026-09-09 — Step 4: download.rs
src/download.rs: streaming download to <download_dir>/.ipx-incomplete/ (same filesystem as the
destination, so filing it is a rename, not the original's copy-then-unlink), content sniffing,
then place(). Filename comes from the URL's last path segment, percent-decoded, unless
Content-Disposition names one (RFC 5987 filename*= preferred). The sanitizer keeps UTF-8 —
latin1_to_ascii existed because 2004 filesystems demanded ASCII — strips the same characters
stringCleaning() did plus control chars, and adds a real 255-byte cap the Python never had,
preserving the extension across truncation.
Sniffing replaces detectFileType(), which called a typeFile module that was already missing in
2008 and so always answered 'data'. Two rules survive: an HTML body is a failed download (login
wall/error page), and a torrent body is a torrent whatever the MIME claimed.
Filters run once at discovery and are recorded in enclosures.state; the download queue is then
just "everything still pending", so an enclosure held back by max_new_per_check is picked up by
the next scan instead of being lost. Keywords are OR'd across keywords and AND'd within one — the
original's nested loop let a later keyword silently undo an earlier miss.
Verified: cargo test 16/16. Smoke against a local server, five enclosures, each filter path hit:
ep1.mp3 -> done, ep2.mp3 -> skipped (explicit), ep2.mp3?v=3 -> skipped (no keyword match),
paywall.html -> error (HTML page, not media), ep5.torrent -> torrent (deferred to step 7).
Smoke 2 and 4 pass, and because a plain rerun 304s before parsing, dedupe was proved separately by
clearing the stored etag/last-modified and re-parsing all five entries: 0 downloaded, hand-deleted
file not refetched, .ipx-incomplete left empty.
Known wart: ipx list counts path IS NOT NULL, so a hand-deleted file still reads as downloaded.
Reconciling rows against the filesystem belongs in step 5.
Next: step 5 — retention.rs.
2026-09-09 — Step 3: feed.rs
src/feed.rs: conditional GET (If-None-Match + If-Modified-Since, optional basic auth) and a
RSS-first / Atom-fallback parser normalising both into ParsedFeed/Entry/Enclosure. Feed-level
itunes:explicit overrides the entry level, as the original did. <ttl> is captured. RSS
content:encoded wins over description. Atom enclosures come only from rel="enclosure" links.
GUID: the original hashed the title or description when no guid existed; here the chain is guid → permalink → enclosure URL → title, all stable identifiers, so no hashing and no MD5 dependency. An entry with none of them has nothing to download and is dropped.
db.rs gained http_state, record_feed, touch_feed, set_feed_error, record_entry,
record_enclosure. A changed title/description flips read back to 0 — what the original's
textDiff was ultimately for, minus the <ins>/<del> markup, which belongs in the UI.
main.rs gained ipx fetch [FEED] [--force]. A failing feed records its error and the scan
continues.
Verified: cargo test 10/10. Gate met against a local python3 -m http.server serving the
fixtures — first run inserted 4 entries + 4 enclosures across an RSS and an Atom feed; second run
showed both skip paths, atomcast: not modified (304) and testcast: not due for 45m (the feed's
own ttl=45 beating interval_mins = 0).
Deferred: nothing downloads yet — enclosure rows land in state pending. That is step 4.
Next: step 4 — download.rs.
2026-09-09 — Step 2: config.rs + db.rs
src/config.rs: serde structs for [general], [torrent] and [feeds.<id>] with defaults, ~
expansion, IPX_CONFIG / IPX_DATA_DIR overrides, save() at mode 0600, Feed::password()
(password_env beats a literal password), Torrent::ports() parsing "6881-6889". A missing
config file loads as an empty one so a fresh install works. Retention defaults are 0/0
(unlimited, keep forever) — nothing gets deleted until Ray asks for it.
src/db.rs: schema exactly as planned, WAL + busy_timeout, Db::open() idempotent, connection
behind a Mutex, feed_summary() for list, now() helper. enclosures.url is UNIQUE — the
dedupe key that replaces history.dat.
src/main.rs: clap skeleton with ipx list. Only the subcommands that work exist; the rest arrive
with their steps.
Verified: cargo test 5/5 green (config defaults, port-range fallback incl. reversed range,
password_env precedence, schema idempotency, enclosure-url uniqueness). Gate met — ipx --config <scratch> list printed both feeds and created state.db once across two runs.
Deferred: nothing. Two dead-code warnings (Config::save, Feed::password) are expected; steps 3
and 8 consume them.
Next: step 3 — feed.rs.
Also added chrono 0.4 (std, clock) for RFC-2822 pubDate parsing in step 3.
2026-09-09 — Step 1: repo skeleton
Repo created at /src/ipodderx-rs, default branch main, cargo init --name ipx (edition 2024,
rustc 1.95.0). LICENSE (MIT, carrying the 2010 copyright), README with the lineage note, and this
file. Hello-world main.rs builds.
Dependency versions pinned today — the later steps are written against these APIs:
| crate | version | notes |
|---|---|---|
| tokio | 1.53.1 | rt-multi-thread, macros, fs, io-util, net, sync, time, signal |
| reqwest | 0.13.5 | default-features = false; features rustls (not rustls-tls — renamed in 0.13), http2, gzip, stream, json, charset, system-proxy (env-var proxy pickup is opt-in in 0.13) |
| rss | 2.1.1 | default features; the with-syndication feature name in my notes does not exist — Atom is handled by the separate crate |
| atom_syndication | 0.12.10 | |
| rusqlite | 0.40.2 | bundled |
| librqbit | 9.0.1 | default-features = false; features rust-tls, http-api-client. The default default-tls feature pulls reqwest/native-tls and an OpenSSL sha1 backend (crypto-hash), which fails to build without pkg-config/OpenSSL headers. API not yet exercised — step 7 |
| serde 1.0.229 / serde_json 1.0.151 / toml 1.1.5 | ||
| clap | 4.6.6 | derive |
| infer 0.22.0 / dirs 7.0.0 / anyhow 1.0.104 / opml 1.1.6 | ||
| tracing 0.1.44 / tracing-subscriber 0.3.23 | env-filter |
Deferred: nothing.
Gotcha worth keeping: three feature names in the plan were wrong against current crate versions —
reqwest/rustls-tls is now rustls, env-var proxy support moved behind system-proxy, and
rss/with-syndication does not exist. librqbit's default features drag in OpenSSL; rust-tls
is the fix. Whole tree is rustls-only now, no C TLS dependency.
Next: step 2 — config.rs + db.rs. (done)