Hi, yes this is mentioned on the installation page of the website, below the Docker instructions. The app can be installed Dockerless using go install; if you choose this option you’ll have to provide and configure Postgres and Redis instances for the app to connect to. That said, Docker is the recommended and easiest option.

Hi, this is a great point and one that I’ve already given consideration to. I’ll address separately the issue of the primary datastore ,i.e. Postgres, and the Redis dependency:

Postgres as the only option for the data store

There are 2 reasons for this:

• Performance: while SQLite could offer a simpler/embedded data store, it simply doesn’t have the performance and features of Postgres. Bitmagnet has a faceted search engine and is write-intensive (it will be discovering ~5k torrents per hour and writing these to the database along with associated metadata). As such, its database may not be suitable for running on older hardware. A SQLite adapter, if it was developed, may simply not be up to the job (although as I haven’t attempted this I can’t say what the performance would be like). That said, Bitmagnet itself is not especially resource intensive, you could probably run it on a Raspberry PI but point it to a Postgres instance on some more powerful hardware. At this stage I’ve only been running it on a M2 Mac Mini with Postgres located on its SSD and so would be interested to know people’s mileage on other hardware.
• Development, support and maintenance overhead: I’m a lone developer and this project is already too big for one person. A SQLite adapter, if feasible performance-wise, I think could only happen if other contributors joined the project as my to-do list is already pretty long. It would have to achieve feature parity with the Postgres implementation which makes use of several Postgres-specific features and extensions. It would also mean a longer testing cycle and therefore probably a slower release cadence. That said, if there was enough demand and assistance then I’d be open to looking into the feasibility of this once the rest of the application is a little more mature and the current database schema more finalised.

Redis dependency

Redis is currently used only for the asynchronous task queue. I would like to have put this in Postgres, but there simply is not a good out-of-the-box solution that works well with Postgres and GoLang, and is actively maintained. I looked at quite a few queuing libraries and eventually settled on asynq (https://github.com/hibiken/asynq), which is a great library and does the job well - but could really do with support for non-Redis backends.

Using Redis here was a pragmatic decision that allowed me to make progress, rather than an optimal one. I guess I could have built a simple Postgres-based queue myself but that would have been a distraction and probably sub-optimal compared with a mature/separately developed library. It remains an option. Since I looked into this a new project has sprung up which I’m keeping an eye on - https://www.tork.run/ - it has a Postgres backend and looks like it might be up to the job, but is very new.

So yes, I’m very aware that the additional Redis dependency is not ideal and it may well disappear at some point.