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cd7a9b8530
With apple_country set, the directory fetches Apple's top 100 podcasts and the top 50 of each of
its 19 categories for that country (itunes.apple.com/{cc}/rss/toppodcasts), looks up each
show's RSS address (/lookup, 100 ids a call, three seconds apart, as Apple asks for no more than
about twenty a minute), and stores them as the snapshot apple-podcasts with no subscribers. The
refresher fetches them like any feed; the most-subscribed chart is unchanged. Apple's primary
genre goes in as the snapshot's category, used only while a feed names none.
The same weekly run reads Apple's genre tree (ws/genres?id=26) and warns when it differs from
ipx_feed's CATEGORIES; on 2026-10-15 they were the same, all 19 and their subcategories.
A syncs table keeps when it last ran: at start if a week has passed, again weekly, an hour after
a failure. keep_instances spares apple-podcasts, which no token holds, and no token may take
the name. A trace a sync, a span each answer.
CLAUDE.md: builds one cargo command at a time, the load looked at before and after, after a
build chained with a test compile took Tower past 200.
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/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 |
| 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.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.