intermodal: a 40' shipping container for the Internet

Intermodal is a user-friendly and featureful command-line BitTorrent metainfo utility. The binary is called imdl and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

At the moment, creation, viewing, and verification of .torrent files is supported.

For more about the project and its goals, check out this post.

Manual

• General
  • Installation
    • Supported Operating Systems
    • Pre-built binaries
    • Cargo
  • Shell Completion Scripts
  • Semantic Versioning
  • Unstable Features
  • Source Signatures
• Acknowledgments

General

Installation

Supported Operating Systems

imdl supports Linux, MacOS, and Windows, and should work on other unix OSes. If it does not, please open an issue!

Pre-built binaries

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows can be found on the releases page.

You can use the following command to download the latest binary for Linux, MacOS, or Windows, just replace DEST with the directory where you'd like to install the imdl binary:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://imdl.io/install.sh | bash -s -- --to DEST

A good place to install personal binaries is ~/bin, which install.sh uses when --to is not supplied. To create the ~/bin directory and install imdl there, do:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://imdl.io/install.sh | bash

Additionally, you'll have to add ~/bin to the PATH environment variable, which the system uses to find executables. How to do this depends on the shell.

For sh, bash, and zsh, it should be done in ~/.profile:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile

For fish, it should be done in ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

echo 'set -gx PATH ~/bin $PATH' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Cargo

imdl is written in Rust and can be built from source and installed with cargo install imdl. To get Rust, use the rustup installer.

Shell Completion Scripts

Shell completion scripts for Bash, Zsh, Fish, PowerShell, and Elvish are available in the [completions](completions directory). Please refer to your shell's documentation for how to install them.

The imdl binary can also generate the same completion scripts at runtime, using the completions command:

$ imdl completions --shell bash > imdl.bash

Semantic Versioning

Intermodal follows semantic versioning.

In particular:

• v0.0.X: Breaking changes may be introduced at any time.
• v0.X.Y: Breaking changes may only be introduced with a minor version number bump.
• vX.Y.Z: Breaking changes may only be introduced with a major version number bump

Unstable Features

To avoid premature stabilization and excessive version churn, unstable features are unavailable unless the --unstable / -u flag is passed, for example imdl --unstable torrent create .. Unstable features may be changed or removed at any time.

Source Signatures

All commits to the intermodal master branch signed with Casey Rodarmor's PGP key with fingerprint 3259DAEDB29636B0E2025A70556186B153EC6FE0, which can be found on keybase and on his homepage.

Acknowledgments

The formatting of imdl torrent show is entirely copied from torf, an excellent command-line torrent creator, editor, and viewer.