b-baka 0.1.1

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BitTorrent Acquisition & Keyword Aggregator

Search torrents and download them without leaving your terminal. One Rust binary, no runtime, no setup.

Status: pre-alpha. The interface, the downloads, the settings page and every source below all work, and pushing a tag builds and publishes a release. The install commands below work from the first tagged release onwards. The plan is in ROADMAP.md.

Why

torlink had the right idea and the wrong plumbing. BAKA is the same idea as a native binary: nothing to install first, nothing left behind, and fast enough that the terminal feels like the point rather than a limitation.

It also keeps its settings in one place. Press s, change what you want, done. No environment variables to discover, no flags to memorise.

Install

winget install BAKA

scoop bucket add baka https://github.com/4G0NYY/BAKA
scoop install baka

cargo install b-baka

winget and Scoop cover Windows, on x64 and on arm64. cargo install works anywhere Rust does, including Linux and macOS. The crates.io name stutters because baka was already taken there, but the command it installs is still baka.

Every release also carries the archives on their own, with a SHA256SUMS.txt next to them, if you would rather unzip the binary and put it somewhere yourself:

(Get-FileHash baka-0.1.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip -Algorithm SHA256).Hash

All four routes install a portable executable and nothing else. Uninstalling removes the binary and leaves config.toml and your downloads alone, so reinstalling finds the settings you already had.

Use

Run it:

baka

Type to search. Paste a magnet link, a bare infohash or the path to a .torrent file into the same box and BAKA downloads it instead of searching for it. Press Enter on an empty box to browse what the sources are listing right now, a share from each category rather than whichever one has the biggest swarms.

Downloads run in the background while you keep searching. Interrupted downloads resume on the next launch. Finished downloads seed until you stop them.

Keys

Settings

Everything configurable lives on one page. Press s, change a row with the arrow keys or press Enter to type a value, and it saves itself when you move on. There are no environment variables and no persistent flags to hunt for.

Settings apply immediately. The few that cannot, such as the listen port, say so on their own row rather than pretending otherwise. Rate limits, the download folder and the queue limits all take effect without a restart.

Behind the page is a single file:

Edit it by hand if you prefer. baka settings opens the page without the rest of the TUI, and baka settings --path prints the location. Deleting the file resets everything to defaults, and a partial file is fine because missing values fall back.

Command line flags override settings for a single run and never write to the file.

Unfinished downloads are remembered elsewhere, because they are progress rather than preference:

Deleting that folder costs you the progress on anything still downloading, and nothing else.

Without a terminal

Add --daemon to watch, serve or files to keep running after you close the terminal or log out. baka --help lists everything.

baka watch picks up magnet links, bare infohashes and .torrent files. Drop a file in, and a moment later it is renamed to .taken or, if there was nothing usable in it, to .failed. With no directory given it uses the watch folder from the Settings page.

baka serve answers POST with a magnet link, an infohash or a file path in the body, one per line, and GET with what is currently running:

curl -d "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:..." http://127.0.0.1:4241
curl http://127.0.0.1:4241

baka files serves the download folder over HTTP, with directory listings and range requests, so a browser or a player can open a finished film without copying it first.

Both listen on 127.0.0.1 by default, which is this machine only. The Settings page has the bind address and both ports if you want them reachable from elsewhere. Think before you widen the magnet intake: it downloads whatever it is handed.

Run one BAKA at a time. The interface, baka get and the headless modes all open the same session, and two of them at once fight over it. Attaching a second interface to a running one is what baka attach will be for.

Sources

A short, hand-picked list. No indexer proxy to configure.

Game results are executables and can run code on your machine. BAKA marks them clearly. Video and subtitle results cannot.

Two of them work differently to the rest, and the Search tab says which source each result came from so you can tell:

• EZTV publishes new releases rather than a search, so a query keeps whatever in the current feed matches it. Browsing is where it shows its whole hand.
• 1337x is blocked or challenged on some networks. BAKA tries its mirrors in turn and moves on quietly if none of them answer.

How it works

Search queries every enabled source at once, each on its own timeout, then merges and ranks by seeders and title match. A source that is down is skipped, not fatal.

Downloads run through a queue that honours the concurrency limits and stop at ratio. A torrent past the limit reads as queued rather than silently doing nothing, and one you pause by hand stays paused, including across a restart.

Downloading uses librqbit in-process. Files land on your disk and nothing routes through a server we control. BAKA talks to the torrent network and to the indexers, and that is all.

Build

git clone https://github.com/4G0NYY/BAKA
cd BAKA
cargo run

Before opening a pull request, read CLAUDE.md. It is written for Claude Code but the rules apply to everyone, and one of them is enforced by CI. CONTRIBUTING.md has the checks to run and how a release is cut.

Legal

BAKA is a search tool and a BitTorrent client. It hosts nothing, indexes nothing and mirrors nothing. What you download with it is on you, and copyright law applies the same way it does everywhere else.

License

MIT.