Torrents & the VPN guard

Bring your own indexer

anistream hosts no content, ships no indexer, and has no default endpoint — the torrent source is a transport with nothing to search until you configure one. What you point it at, and the responsibility that comes with that, is yours, under the laws that apply to you. The source is off by default, gated behind the VPN guard, and a config edit away from being removed entirely.

anistream provides the torrent transport — a librqbit session behind the VPN guard, streaming over loopback HTTP — and no index of what to fetch. There is no built-in indexer and no default endpoint: the search URL, the trackers and any curation service are yours to supply, and the source stays inert until they are set.

Torrent traffic also exposes your IP to every peer in the swarm, so this is off until you choose a VPN mode and the guard passes.

[providers.torrent]
enabled = true

# Required. `{query}` is replaced with the URL-encoded search terms.
rss_url = "https://your-indexer.example/?page=rss&q={query}"

# Required in practice: proxy mode disables DHT, so without trackers there are no peers.
trackers = ["udp://tracker.example:1337/announce"]

# Optional: "which release of this is the good one?", keyed on the AniList id.
curation_url = "https://your-curation.example/api/records?filter=(alID={anilist_id})&expand=trs"

[providers.torrent.vpn]
mode = "socks5"                            # "socks5" | "external" | "none"
socks_url = "socks5://10.64.0.1:1080"      # Mullvad's in-tunnel endpoint
mullvad_exit = true                        # or require_asn_org = ["31173"]
verify_interval_secs = 60
on_leak = "pause"

Streams are pulled through librqbit, playing while downloading, seekable.

What the feed has to look like

Any RSS feed whose <item>s carry a title, a link and an info hash works. Tag names are matched by local name, so <seeders>, <idx:seeders> and <torznab:seeders> are all understood — the namespace is irrelevant. Seeder counts drive ranking, so a feed without them still works but ranks worse.

Curation, if configured, is expected to answer in a PocketBase-shaped collection (items[].expand.trs[] carrying isBest, releaseGroup, dualAudio and a release url). Picks pointing anywhere other than your indexer’s host are ignored, since a link that needs a different account cannot be played.

What the guard does

• Routes the session through your VPN’s SOCKS5 proxy.
• Forces DHT off. SOCKS5 UDP-associate is unreliable and librqbit does not document whether DHT is tunnelled, so it is treated as a leak.
• Verifies egress through the proxy before any session starts.
• Re-checks on an interval, and pauses every torrent if a check fails.

Its limits

This is application-level containment, not kernel-enforced: librqbit has no bind-to-interface option, so the guard stops anistream leaking and nothing else on your machine. Add your VPN’s kill switch if you want a real guarantee:

mullvad lockdown-mode set on

anistream --doctor reports whether it is on. Mullvad’s in-tunnel 10.64.0.1 is worth preferring for a second reason: it is only reachable through the tunnel, so a dropped tunnel makes the proxy unreachable instead of quietly leaking.

Watched vs. downloaded

Playing while downloading means an episode can count before its file is complete. Watched versus resumable keeps those ideas apart: commit_threshold decides when it is watched, and resume state is its own thing.

Seeding is off by default, which is a privacy choice. Completed downloads get subtitles muxed in with a stream copy.