Wanchan is a command line Nyaa Torrents client specifically geared towards downloading and watching anime series. It has the following features:

• Search and download episodes or whole series.
• Use NyaaTorrents or arbitrary RSS feeds as episode sources.
• Filter search results on season, episode, release group and other criteria.
• Automatic ranking of result coherence: prefer results with better metadata.
• Grouping of related episodes: get the whole series from the same group, in the same format.
• Seen episodes cache: don't download episodes you already have.
• Shell integration: run arbitrary commands over downloaded episodes.
• Batch mode: perform a whole bunch of searches at once.
• Daemon mode: never miss a release again, let wanchan keep track of new episodes.
• Web daemon mode: explore and track new releases using a fancy web interface.

Make sure you have the Haskell platform installed and the Haste compiler and check out the repository.

In he repository root, run make deps to install all necessary dependencies. Then, run make user-install to install wanchan into ~/.local/bin. You can also run make global-install as root, to install for all users, or just make and grab the resulting binary yourself.

To perform a simple search:

$ wanchan assassination classroom

This will yield all hits for Assassion Classroom without any particular filtering. That's a bit much, so let's restrict it:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100

This filters out all episodes which are not both from season 1 and in the range of episodes 1 to 100. By giving a range of episode numbers, we also exclude any releases which lack episode numbers, such as batch torrents, OP/ED and other related material.

Note that wanchan automatically suggested to get all episodes from HorribleSubs, even though judging by our initial, unfiltered, search there are plenty of other release groups to choose from. By default, wanchan only chooses one file per season and episode, and prioritizes files based on whether or not it's possible to get the entire series from the same source. If we're just exploring our possibilities, this is too strict. We can instead tell wanchan to include all results that didn't get filtered out:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 --list

This shows us that we have a lot of options to choose from. Maybe we want to go with FFF instead:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -gFFF

...or maybe we prefer HorribleSubs' 480p version over their 1080p version for some reason:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -r480p

When we're happy with the results we're getting, we can download all torrents in one fell swoop by simply adding the --get option:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -r480p --get

However, now we end up with a whole bunch of torrent files in our current working directory - that may not be what we wanted. Instead, we can redirect the files to a directory of our choosing, for instance a torrents subdirectory:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -r480p --get -o./torrents

This plays nicely together with BitTorrent clients that watch a torrent directory for new downloads, such as Transmission: simply use your BitTorrent client's incoming torrents directory as wanchan's output directory to start your downloads right away.

However, not all torrent clients work this way. Instead you may need to run some command to start downloading new torrents. Wanchan still has you covered: you can use the -x option to run a shell command on each downloaded torrent file:

$ wanchan assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -r480p --get -o./torrents -x'rtorrent %f'

To simplify downloading episodes from several series at the same time, you can put searches into batch files. We create a file batch.txt with the following contents:

assassination classroom -s1 -e1..100 -r480p
yuruyuri -s3 -e1..100 -r1080p

Then we call wanchan with the --batch option, leaving out the filters:

$ wanchan --batch batch.txt -o./torrents -x'rtorrent %f'

This will download the first season of Assassination Classroom in 480p, and the third season of YuruYuri in 1080p to the torrents subdirectory, and then run the rtorrent command on each downloaded torrent file.

You can also set wanchan to watch Nyaa for new episodes for you using daemon mode:

$ wanchan --daemon=60 batch.txt -o./torrents -x'rtorrent %f'

This will cause wanchan to go into batch mode using the specified file every 60 minutes, as specified by the 60 passed to the --daemon option. However, this will re-download all episodes of the series given in batch.txt every 60 minutes. That's probably not what we want. To avoid this, we can use a "seen" file: a file which records the episodes wanchan has already downloaded.

$ wanchan --daemon=60 batch.txt -o./torrents -x'rtorrent %f' --database=db.sqlite

This will use the file db.sqlite to record episode titles as they are downloaded. New downloads are not initiated for episodes that are recorded in this file.

Finally, you can tell wanchan to start in web daemon mode: a web application which lets you easily explore and track new releases. This mode accepts the same flags as daemon mode, except that watched series are stored in the database file and not in separate batch text files:

$ wanchan --web-daemon=60 -o./torrents -x'rtorrent %f' --database=db.sqlite

To access the web interface, point your browser to http://localhost:8888.