DO NOT USE. PROJECT DEPRECATED.

In the middle of working on this project I found FlexGet, another Python-based tool that provides a more complete "auto-show-downloading" functionality. I recommend using that instead (as I did for a while).

This project is here for historical purposes only. I don't remember if it was ever completed.

###What Is animagic

animagic is a tool (or set of tools) to allow easy downloading of currently-running anime. It's intended for people who have a number of shows they want to track, but aren't interested in manually downloading each new episode.

Requirements

Requires Python 3.2+ and lxml

###How does it work?

Basically it downloads the episodes for you from nyaa.eu. It finds them with some interesting scraping based on format strings, specific to the anime and distributor you want. It downloads the torrent files to the folder of your choice. Done!

###What must I do?

1. Create a configuration file based on the example config in the repo. Required entries for each anime are: a web formatstring, all the features used in that formatstring, and specifically a title feature. The title feature is required for all anime, regardless of its use in the format string.
2. Set the script (animagic-cli) to be run regularly (daily, hourly, whatever). This script is what will actually update your local anime torrent files. Setting this up is probably easiest with cron under Linux -- see your distribution's documentation for more information on using cron.
3. Do something with the torrent files. This script does not download actual anime -- just the torrent files. You can watch the torrent directory with a tool like transmission's daemon client.

###Config file

The config file is a YAML document containing a sequence of dictionaries. Each dictionary is an "entry" corresponding to an anime show. See the sample config for some (working in the past) show configurations.

###Format strings

The format strings use Python's own formatting language. See the official Python format string specification for detailed information on it.

Think of the format strings as search terms, since that's basically what they are. Episodes are found based on their containing the string.

Please note that the format string is passed over (i.e. formatted) twice: first the features are inserted, and then in the second pass, any episode identifiers will be replaced with the episode number. The upshot of this is that you must give the anime a feature that contains an '{episode}' string or variant thereof. This feature should then be referenced in the format string in the location you want the episode number to eventually be.

One issue that comes up is when torrent providers use zero-filled episode numbers, for instance "01" instead of "1". The sample config shows a way to deal with this using the format string minilanguage and the two passes over the format string to zero-pad the episode number.