Transcopy

Note this is a work in progress and very much a 'scratch my own itch' project.

Also Note: this is not designed to be run on a public-facing internet connection - use on your own LAN only.

A very bare-bones web app which lets me copy files from my raspberry pi to my little PVR/media box. My rpi runs a transmission daemon to download entirely legitimate torrents. I then copy them to another pi which is running kodi (libreElec) to watch as streaming them can be a little annoying. I was getting a bit fed up ssh'ing to the pi and running a script which copied files, so thought it would be easier to write a little web app so I could kick off the copying from my phone (or whatever) while I'm slumped on the sofa.

What it does

It will show you a list of torrents (via the Transmission daemon). You can pick some of those and kick off a series of queued background jobs which will copy those files to another directory (eg, a samba share). It does them one at a time as doing multiple files at once seems to make my poor rpi wifi fall over. It can also send you notification emails when the files have copied.

It's somewhat of an SPA (single page app) in that it'll show live progress of downloading files, copying status etc. It uses Vue.js to handle most of that.

Installation - With Docker

There is a docker-stack.yml file which you can use to deploy to a docker swarm (I tend to make even single-node machines into swarms - just run docker swarm init). You just need to create a docker secret with your env file contents then run a build & deploy command. You'll also have to modify the docker-stack.yml file to suit the paths you want to use for downloading torrents etc.

There is a deploy.sh script which can do most of the work for you - you'll have to modify it a little to suit your IP addresses and docker-hub name. But then you can just run ./deploy.sh and it'll do the rest for you.

If you want to do things a little more manually, then you can :

export APP_PORT=80  # or whatever port you want to run on
export PHP_VERSION=7.3  # or whichever newer version
export IMAGE_NAME=transcopy:1.0
export DOTENV_NAME=transcopy-dotenv-1
docker secret create ${DOTENV_NAME} .env.docker
docker build --build-arg=PHP_VERSION=${PHP_VERSION} --target=prod  -t ${IMAGE_NAME} .
docker stack deploy -c docker-stack.yml transcopy

The docker stack will bring up the webserver with the app in it and also Redis and a transmission daemon. You can get to the web frontend of transmission by going to http://your-host:9091 .

Installation - Manually

Assuming you have PHPv7, composer and redis installed.

Clone the project, then run (in the project directory) :

• composer install
• cp .env.example .env
• php artisan key:generate
• touch database/database.sqlite
• php artisan migrate

Now edit the .env file to fill in the values that match your system setup (eg, mail notification address, path to your files/torrents).

Then edit config/filesystems.php - the default is set to use minio on your remote server (which is what I have going). If you are just mounting your remote/kodi box via samba then comment out the current 'destination' entry and comment in the one with the 'driver' set to 'local'.

In theory you are now good to go. You might want to disable redis from auto-saving it's db if this is the only thing you are using it for. On debian/ubuntu for instance if you have apt-get install redis-server to install it then comment out the 'save' lines in /etc/redis/redis.conf then restart redis, eg:

# save 900 1
# save 300 10
# save 60 10000

Running

You should really set up apache or nginx to serve the app. That's beyond of the scope of these docs, but if you install apache2+php7 on your rpi, then at the very least in the /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf you can set

DocumentRoot /var/www/html/transcopy/public

option and something like :

<Directory /var/www/html/transcopy>
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride All
	Require all granted
</Directory>

To process the background copy jobs just run php artisan queue:work --tries=1 --timeout=0. You can add a systemd entry to keep that going all the time - something like :

# in /lib/systemd/system/transcopy.service
[Unit]
Description=Queue worker for transcopy
After=network.target auditd.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /var/www/html/transcopy/artisan queue:work --tries=1 --timeout=0 --daemon
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then run systemctl enable transcopy.service and systemctl start transcopy.

Now you should be able to point your browser to http://your-rpi-ip-address/ and see the default page. Click the 'refresh' button to get the up-to-date list of torrents from the transmission daemon.

Copying torrents which are still downloading

You can start copying a torrent which is still downloading - the system will keep checking it's status every five minutes and start the actual copy once it's finished downloading.