Giuseppe Mattia Greco When managing a self-hosted homelab, automation is key. While orchestrating my media stack (Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, etc.) with Docker, I wanted a clean, universal way to receive notifications the moment a download completed in qBittorrent.
qBittorrent has an excellent “Run external program on torrent completion” feature, but wiring it up to individual APIs (like Telegram, Discord, or Slack) is tedious and rigid. Enter Apprise.
Apprise is a fantastic Python library that standardizes notifications across almost every platform imaginable. I wrote a lightweight script to bridge these two tools seamlessly.
How It Works
The project is essentially a targeted Python wrapper (notifier.py). Here is the core workflow:
- Configuration: A simple
config.yamlstores the Apprise URLs (e.g.,tgram://...ordiscord://...). - qBittorrent Execution: In qBittorrent’s settings, you configure it to call the script upon torrent completion, passing the torrent’s name and category as CLI arguments:
python3 /path/to/notifier.py "%N" "%L" - Apprise Delivery: The script parses the arguments, formats a clean message (including the category, which is incredibly useful for distinguishing between Radarr movies and Sonarr TV shows), and dispatches it via Apprise to all configured endpoints.
Why Build This?
- Universal Compatibility: By leveraging Apprise, this single script supports dozens of notification services out of the box. No need to rewrite API calls if you switch from Telegram to Matrix.
- Simplicity: It relies on standard Python libraries and a clean YAML configuration, making it incredibly easy to deploy within a Docker container or directly on a host machine like a Raspberry Pi.
- Homelab Integration: It fits perfectly into a larger automated media pipeline, providing instant feedback without bloated middleware.
It’s a small, focused script, but it solves a very specific problem efficiently.
Contributing
You can review the code, grab the config.yaml.example, and adapt it for your own homelab at the following link:
