How it works

There are two flows: searching for media (Torznab) and downloading it (the qBittorrent API). The .torrent files involved are not real torrents — they're tiny stubs jack hands to *arr, which sends them back to jack through the qBittorrent download-client API. Nothing ever touches BitTorrent.

1. Search flow (Torznab)

The setup happens once, at startup: jack registers itself in each destination Radarr/Sonarr as a Torznab indexer and — when downloads is configured — as a qBittorrent download client. Both registrations point at jack.internalUrl and authenticate with an auto-issued managed key. If you'd rather register jack yourself, set that server's autoregister.enable to false.

From then on, every search works like this:

1. When you search or monitor something, Radarr/Sonarr query jack's /torznab endpoint with that managed key.
2. jack fans the query out to every peer you've configured, calling each one's /peer/search with the API key that peer issued you.
3. Each peer searches its own Radarr/Sonarr library — movies and episodes that have files — and returns matching releases, mirroring the *arr file metadata.
4. jack turns each match into a Torznab "release" whose download link points back at itself: /torznab/download/<peerId>:<itemId>.torrent.
5. Radarr/Sonarr show these as grabbable releases — indistinguishable from a normal indexer's results.

2. Download flow (qBittorrent API)

1. You grab a release. Your *arr's download client is the qBittorrent client jack registered on startup, pointed at jack's own qBittorrent API — so *arr fetches the stub .torrent from jack and immediately POSTs it back to jack at /api/v2/torrents/add.
2. That .torrent is a stub — bencoded data that just encodes the peerId and itemId. No trackers, no pieces; it's never written to disk.
3. jack parses the stub, finds the matching peer, and queues the download.
4. jack downloads the real file over HTTP from that peer's /peer/items/:id/file endpoint into downloads.completedPath.
5. *arr polls jack's /api/v2/torrents/info for progress; once jack reports the torrent complete, *arr scans the completed folder and imports the file into your library, renamed and tracked.

3. Serving — being a peer to others

When a friend lists you as a peer, their jack calls your /peer/* endpoints, authenticated with the peer API key you issued them:

• /peer/search — search your Radarr/Sonarr library.
• /peer/items/:id — release metadata.
• /peer/items/:id/file — stream the actual file.

jack streams files straight from disk using the paths your Radarr/Sonarr report, so the jack process must be able to read your media files at those same paths — mount your media into the container the same way your *arr apps see it.