J_j_s·Dec 14, 2017Submission
Magnetissimo: index popular torrent sites and search the local database
2 points · Open discussionsergiotapia
magnetissimo
Elixir2016–2026
sergiotapia / magnetissimo
magnetissimo
Web application that indexes all popular torrent sites, and saves it to the local database.
9Distinct people
21Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Web application that indexes all popular torrent sites, and saves it to the local database.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
My Elixir/Phoenix project Magnetissimo. When KickassTorrents died, I thought I should just build my own crawler and be done with it. Elixir's OTP was a fantastic fit, I scrape…
sergiotapia used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year21 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-08-21 15:19:44 UTC to 2026-10-16 15:40:21 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesIt's more but not even 100MB: https://archive.org/details/pirate-bay-torrent-dumps-2004-20...
This does not include the descriptions though.
Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
In How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate BayI can see this working if your project's target audience is developers. But for most projects where the target audience is just regular users, most vastly prefer a simple CRUD form to create an issue.
Checkout some of the issue I have in my repo: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
They are valuable insight into the problems people have, and if I asked them to open a PR for every problem I would most likely have 1 or 2 at most issues open. Everybody loses.
In Turning Off GitHub Issues (2016)Rarbg has an API, they actually let me know in my PR to include Rarbg: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo/pull/45#issuecom...
In ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for GoodI was about to add them to our tracker list. :(
https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
There's something really sad when these sites die, a part of my teenage life is gone for good. I felt the same way when Demonoid shut down.
Can these sites skate the legality line by offering only magnet links? Why are their costs so high if they can just host magnet links and cache the site with Varnish or something similar?
In ExtraTorrent Shuts Down for GoodIt's not needed, thankfully:
https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo/issues/30
In Show HN: Magnetissimo – Self-hosted torrent search engine written in ElixirHope you guys like this and use it! If it's hard to use, tell me. My goal is to make this simple to run anywhere. Part of that will be to use Distillery to create compiled executables.
I rewrote this after an initial version that used Redis as a queue to process. Asking end users to install Redis was a step too far I think, so I stepped back and thought about how to solve this without external dependencies.
I ended up with a simple Elixir and Erlang queue implementation. It works much simpler, just as fast, and no freaky deps. GenServer starts up a worker for each crawler, and it schedules work by itself. It's really strange to use a language so complete, it kind of feels like cheating. Programming in easy-mode.
Pull requests very welcome to the crawler folder, it's super easy to write a crawler for your favorite site!
https://github.com/
Read the rest
Show HN: Magnetissimo – Self-hosted torrent search engine written in Elixir
403 points · Open discussionThat's why I built Magnetissimo: https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo
It's easy to build a crawler, the hard part is spending time on bullshit like DMCA takedowns and such. Even if you say: "I just crawl, I don't provide download links, I don't even know what is indexed", you have to deal with legal issues.
So, host your own locally or for your community. No big deal.
Even Google has to deal with DMCA!
In Show HN: Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine