MeRT

I ran into a neat little program called CouchPotato. It is used for downloading movies off the internet. It works with either nzb or torrent files. Once you have it installed you can search for movies that you would like, and add them to your want list. When you add it to the want list you also specify the quality that you would like the movie to be. There are options to have it rename the files and put them in a different directory.

I am installing this on and Ubuntu 10.04 machine.

CouchPotato requires Python 2.6 or higher to run. You also need to make sure that you have git installed so that you can download the program. You may reinstall it by running the following command.

sudo apt-get install git-core

Now lets move to the directory that we want to install CouchPotato to. I have selected this specific folder because that is where the default install is set. This will allow us to use the initd that was created for the program without having to modify it. A standard user will not have permissions to get the git repository so we will run it with sudo.
It is installed by default into CouchPotato, but the initd says couchpotato all lower case so we’ll move it.

cd /usr/local/sbin
sudo git clone http://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotato.git
sudo mv CouchPotato couchpotato

Now if you want to get started playing right away you can get into the couchpotato directory and start up couchpotato. We add the -d to the end of the command to make it run as a deamon.

cd couchpotato
sudo python CouchPotato.py -d

By default the program runs on port 5000. This can be changed by going into the settings on the web application which is now located at http://localhost:5000, assuming that you just installed it on your local machine. You will have to substitute localhost with whatever IP you need to if you installed it on a remote machine.

Once you log into the webpage you will have to set up your copy of CouchPotato. Go to the settings on the page and go through all the items and fill them in as necessary.

No that you have CouchPotato up and running you probably want to make sure that it starts up everytime you restart your machine. This is where the initd comes in.

cd /usr/local/sbin/couchpotato
sudo cp initd /etc/init.d/couchpotato
sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/couchpotato

Now you need to update-rc.d so that it will be added to the System Startup

sudo update-rc.d couchpotato defaults

Which will look like the following

$ sudo update-rc.d couchpotato defaults
 Adding system startup for /etc/init.d/couchpotato ...
   /etc/rc0.d/K20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc1.d/K20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc6.d/K20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc2.d/S20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc3.d/S20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc4.d/S20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato
   /etc/rc5.d/S20couchpotato -> ../init.d/couchpotato

Finally to start the program without the re-booting your machine you will need to run the following

sudo /etc/init.d/couchpotato start

Here are some additional notes from the readme.

• If you want, change “RUN_AS=root” to another user.
• If your CP installation isn’t in “/usr/local/sbin/couchpotato/”, make sure to change the path in the initd script.
• Make executable “sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/couchpotato”
• Start “sudo /etc/init.d/couchpotato start”