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205 of the Directory's 208 feeds without a category had never been read: on 2026-10-05 at 03:24 UTC every one failed with "dns error: ... Temporary failure in name resolution" within a minute, during an outage on Tower that also stopped iPX's log reaching Loki until Tower rebooted at 11:56. They are working podcasts, NPR's, Megaphone's, Acast's, which resolve now. A feed nobody subscribes to is read once a day and a failing one backs off up to a day (#99), so each sat failing, unread and so uncategorised (#117) until the next day, and explain_failure called every DNS error "This address no longer resolves; the site is gone.", on its page and since #142 on its Directory page. A forced check of the 208 read 205; each has its items, its description and its own category now. A temporary lookup failure, EAI_AGAIN, is not recorded on the feed at all: no last_error, no error_since to back off from or call it gone by. The daemon notes it in Ctx::retry and the feed is due again in ten minutes, which the scan's due check and the sleep until the next scan both honour; a restart forgets it, which only makes the retry sooner. A name that does not exist is still the feed's error, explained as "may be gone", and the Directory page, like the feed's own, names a cause only once a feed has been failing a day; before that its last check failed. The page also drops "Nobody here subscribes yet", which said nothing worth a line. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
ipx
A self-hosted podcatcher for a household. It checks your feeds, downloads the episodes, and serves
a web UI modelled on the 2004 Mac app iPodderX, for any number of people sharing one copy of
the files. One Rust binary, ipx, is both the daemon and the command line.
It is a rewrite of ipodderx-core, the Python engine behind iPodderX (2004-2008, Ray Slakinski & August Trometer).
What it does
- The web UI. It has a toolbar, and a feed list that opens with the Directory, Currently Listening and All Subscriptions. Items sit in a sortable table with a Files pane, and there is a player bar. It comes in Dark, Light and Classic themes, and works on a phone.
- Several people, one copy. Each person has their own subscriptions and their own read, pinned and playback state. There is one file on disk per episode, however many people want it. People sign in with a password or through a proxy (Cloudflare Zero Trust or Authentik), and admins manage accounts and settings.
- Scanning. Feeds are checked on a schedule, globally or per feed, and a feed's own TTL is honoured. Keyword, explicit-content and media-type filters decide what is downloaded, with a limit on how many of a feed's newest episodes are downloaded.
- Downloads. Files come over HTTP or BitTorrent and are filed into a folder per feed. Retention deletes the oldest files to stay under a disk quota or an age limit, and never touches an item someone has pinned.
- OPML. You can import and export your own subscriptions. You can also subscribe to an OPML URL, which keeps a whole list in step as a folder.
Run it
With Docker:
docker build -t ipx .
docker compose up -d
docker-compose.yml is set up for the author's own server. Point its image and its three volumes
(/config, /data and /downloads) at yours first. The UI is on port 8099. BitTorrent uses 6881
over TCP and UDP. Files are written as PUID/PGID, 99:100 by default.
From source:
cargo build --release
./target/release/ipx daemon
The first start creates admin / ipodderx. Sign in at /login, then change it:
echo -n 'a good password' | ipx user passwd admin
The UI is plain HTTP, so put TLS in front of it if it is reachable from outside your network.
Documentation
| docs/configuration.md | Every config key, path and environment variable |
| docs/cli.md | Every command, including ipx user |
| docs/users.md | Accounts, and what several people share |
| docs/sso.md | Signing in through Cloudflare Zero Trust or Authentik |
| docs/architecture.md | How it works: modules, schema, control socket, HTTP API |
| CHANGELOG.md | What changed, by release |
| CLAUDE.md | Notes for working on the code, including how production is deployed |
Tests
cargo test # the engine: parsing, filters, retention, schedules, SQL, per-user state
node tests/page-smoke.js # the page script loads without throwing
node tests/native-bridge.js # the page hands playback to a native shell
npx playwright test # a real browser against a real daemon on fixture feeds
npm install gets the test runner, and npx playwright install --with-deps chromium gets the
browser.
License
MIT, see LICENSE. The icons are Font Awesome Free 7.3.1 by @fontawesome, under CC BY 4.0, embedded as SVG.