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Share handed over the raw file address or the item's link: no preview, no time, nothing a person without iPX could do much with. Now, as Overcast does, an episode shares as a short link to its own page, play.ipxreader.app/e/<id>, which anyone can open: the show's art and name, the episode's title, date, length and notes, a player on the publisher's own file starting at ?t= if a time was shared, buttons to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts or Castro, and Open Graph tags for a preview where the link is pasted. ipx-play is a service of its own (crates/play), built like the directory: ipx sends it the episode with its token (POST /v1/shares) and gets the link back. The id comes from the feed's address and the guid, so the same episode is one link whoever shares it. Only episodes of feeds the directory would be sent go there, by the directory's own rule (snapshot_entries), so the two cannot disagree on what is private; ipx-play also refuses an address that looks private. Anything else, and any server without ipx-play set up, shares as before. In the page, Share on an episode opens a menu once the link is back: Share link, Share from 12:34 (the player's clock, or where you left off), Copy link. A menu because the share sheet needs a press of its own, and the request for the link used up the one that opened it. The page runs no script: the start time is the media fragment #t=, and its CSP loads nothing but its stylesheet, the art and the file. Admin, Directory, Sharing episodes sets the address and token. The browser suite starts its own ipx-play; it was not run here (no Caddy on this Mac). 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 build -f Dockerfile.web -t ipx-web .
docker compose up -d
docker-compose.yml is a sample: ipx, with its database in SQLite and its three volumes
(/config, /data and /downloads) in folders beside the file, and ipx-web, the page, served by
Caddy in front of it. Change them to suit. 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/ipxd daemon
The first start creates admin with a random password, written to admin-password beside
config.toml (readable by ipx's user alone; the log says where, never what it is). Set
IPX_ADMIN_PASSWORD to choose it instead. Sign in at /login, then change it:
echo -n 'a good password' | ipxd 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 ipxd 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 |
| crates/ipx/CHANGELOG.md, web/CHANGELOG.md, crates/directory/CHANGELOG.md | What changed, by release, for ipx, the page and the directory |
| 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.ts # the page script loads without throwing
node tests/native-bridge.ts # 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.