ipx/docs/users.md

Accounts, and what several people share

ipx serves any number of people from one copy of the data. The rule that decides everything else: there is one file on disk per enclosure URL. Two people subscribed to the same show cost one fetch, one parse and one file.

What is yours, what is everyone's

Yours alone	The same for everyone
Read, pinned, playback position	The feed's URL
Which feeds you see at all	Its download folder
Keywords, auto-download, explicit, per-scan cap	When it is scanned
	The file on disk

The right-hand column describes the feed and the file rather than a preference — two people wanting different folders would mean two copies. Those three are admin-only, and the API returns 403 for anyone else rather than merely hiding the controls.

How the scanner merges everyone's wants

One fetch serves every subscriber, so the policy is a union:

• an item is downloaded if anyone wants it — one person's keyword set matching is enough, and one person with no keywords removes the filter for that feed entirely
• auto-download is on if anyone has it on
• the per-scan cap is the largest anyone asked for

So "auto-download off" means I don't cause downloads, not I never see them. If someone else's subscription pulls an item, you see it listed as downloaded and can play it, because the enclosure is shared.

Deleting

Deleting a file deletes everyone's copy. A feed with other subscribers labels the button Delete for everyone and names them in the confirmation, and the server has the last word: if anyone else has pinned the item or not played it yet, DELETE /api/enclosures/{id} answers 409 with the reason, and only ?force=true goes through.

Retention follows the same rule: an item anyone pinned keeps its file, and it counts as read only once every subscriber has read it.

Signing in

Three ways, tried in order of how specific the claim is:

1. A proxy header naming the user — Cloudflare Zero Trust or Authentik. Honoured only from an address in trusted_proxies. See sso.md.
2. A session cookie from signing in at /login. Argon2id hashes, sessions in the database, idle timeout session_days.
3. The shared [web] token, which signs in as the admin — this is what the Docker healthcheck and any scripts use.

A database with no accounts creates admin / ipodderx on the next daemon start and says so in the log. Change it:

echo -n 'a good password' | ipx user passwd admin

Adding someone

echo -n 'their password' | ipx user add sam

They sign in at /login and start with no feeds: subscriptions are per person. Adding a feed someone else already has costs nothing — no second fetch, no second copy — it just appears on their list with their own read state. Unsubscribing removes it from their list alone; only when the last subscriber leaves does the feed stop being scanned, and even then its files and history stay, so re-subscribing does not pull the back catalogue again.

Directory sits at the top of the feed list, above your own feeds. It opens on the ten feeds with the most subscribers on this server, you included, ranked, then the categories, each a tile showing a few of its shows' covers. A category has a page of its own: its most subscribed feeds, then all of them as a grid of cover art, with its subcategories along the top (Tech News under News, Video Games under Leisure) and a choice of order. See all lists every feed, and the search box finds one by name. A feed you do not subscribe to opens a page of its own, with what it says it is and its latest episodes or posts, so you can see what it is first. Every page can be narrowed to Podcasts (anything with audio or video) or Blogs (the rest). A show's category is the one it gives itself in iTunes, or for one that names none, one an admin or iPX picked for it. Your own feeds are marked Subscribed. It shows a title, artwork and a count, never a URL or who reads it. An OPML subscription is listed as the feeds inside it, one by one, and never the OPML itself, so you can take just the shows you want. Anything that looks private is left out: a login configured for the feed, credentials in its URL, or a key such as auth= or token= in the query, or a feed from a paid-feed service such as Patreon or Supercast, which put the key in the path, and any feed inside an OPML that looks private itself. Those are someone's paid subscriptions, and listing them would let anyone here read what they pay for.

Currently Listening, under the Directory, is every episode you started and have not finished, across all your feeds, with how much is left. A click picks one up where you left off. The search box looks through it, as it does a feed's items, and through the Directory by name.

An admin can do the same from Settings → Manage users…: add someone (with a password, or none for someone the proxy signs in), tick or untick Admin, or remove an account. Removing one takes its subscriptions and read state with it; downloaded files stay. The only admin cannot be demoted or removed there, so there is always someone who can manage the rest.

Admin

The first account is an admin. An admin can change global settings (scanning interval, quota, retention, media types, download folder), a feed's URL, folder and schedule, and who has an account and who else is an admin, and read the log, which names everyone's feeds and sign-ins. Everyone else gets the Settings and Log buttons hidden and a 403 if they ask anyway.

ipx user list      # the admin column says who