What.cd's Gazelle on GitHub

https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle

by hswolff • 13 years ago

69 59 13 years ago

github.com

kbar13• 13 years ago

not really sure why we're posting private trackers' projects, but here is waffles.fm's:

https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter

antocv2• 13 years ago

Is waffels still going, are they accepting new members?

dewey8• 13 years ago

Yes and yes, but this is not the place to ask for invites.

quchen2• 13 years ago

Could someone explain what this is?

nutmeg• 13 years ago

The Bittorrent tracker software used to run What.CD, a popular music torrent site.

aroch2• 13 years ago

'Gazelle' is the bittorrent tracker frontend developed by What.CD (For those not in the know, one of the largest music trackers out there).

bigdubs• 13 years ago

actually 'ocelot' is the tracker itself, gazelle is just the site that the users access to get the torrents

quchen2• 13 years ago

Ah, thanks.

andrewflnr2• 13 years ago

So, what is a bittorrent tracker?

samolang• 13 years ago

What.cd is a private torrenting site. They decided to open source the code they use to run their site.

sciurus2• 13 years ago

It appears they decided to publish to code, but the license isn't open source as defined at http://opensource.org/docs/osd

dewey8• 13 years ago

A minor detail: The codebase was open source for a long time already, just on their own git and available on what.cd/gazelle and the IRC channel instead of GitHub.

Spittie• 13 years ago

They wrote a small announcement in their forum. For anyone that can't read it:

  This is an important change for Gazelle coders. You may have noticed that gazelle/ is now redirecting to http://whatcd.github.io/Gazelle/. 
  This is due to the fact that we are now hosting our public Gazelle repository on GitHub. 
  The old gazelle site had become severely outdated and a nuisance to maintain. 
  Luckily for us, GitHub is the perfect solution. 
  You can view our Gazelle repository here—it is accompanied by a GitHub page providing a brief overview of the project as well as a wiki with important information such as installation instructions, coding standards, and API documentation.

daturkel• 13 years ago

This might get passed off as something for people looking do to evil/illegal/etc projects, but Gazelle is easily the best tracker front-end out there and it's super customizable (google "Gazelle tracker" and you'll likely find a bunch of screenshots of different sites implementing it differently—from skinning it to adding new features). Bittorrent is underused as a medium for legal downloads and I encourage anyone interested in a torrent site of any kind to check this out before they try to write their own.

FZeroX8• 13 years ago

This is my go-to example of a cool legal* website running Gazelle: http://panda.cd/

If you know of any others please let me know!

* Not that the well-known ones are illegal either, really, but the point is slightly academic as they will still throw people in jail over it...

mjgoins• 13 years ago

Not free (or "open source") from what I can tell.

  COPYRIGHTED AND PATENTED PENDING BY WHAT.CD INCORPORATED, 
  DBA/AKA PROJECT GAZELLE

Which is a bit confusing, but then later:

  FOR NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY

slacka2• 13 years ago

It was first released under the GPLv3 http://torrentfreak.com/gazelle-rejuvenates-the-bittorrent-t...

You can view a mirror of the original release here: https://code.google.com/p/gazellewhatcd/

sciurus2• 13 years ago

Looking at your link, I see https://code.google.com/p/gazellewhatcd/source/browse/trunk/....

That isn't the GPLv3. That isn't even a free software license (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), since they only grant a license "FOR NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSES".

stayclassytally• 13 years ago

Also, this page:

http://whatcd.github.io/Gazelle/

k2052• 13 years ago

I find it repulsive that a torrent tracker is released under a restrictive license with Copyrights and Patents.

adPothier• 13 years ago

Ocelot, their custom-made C++ tracker is a nice piece of code. They were forced to drop out php-based and XBTT-based trackers some years ago when the server load from their became huge peer swarm became unmanageable.

TorrentFreak made a great story about this[1].

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-debuts-lightweight-tracker-f...

FZeroX8• 13 years ago

PHP wasn't really the limiting factor, it's the architecture that XBTT uses that really kills you - an SQL query for every single announce! (With millions of peers that means hundreds of SQL queries per second just to maintain your swarm)

Some other cool trackers to look at are Shadowolf (although I believe that's discontinued, sadly) and Lioness if that's floating around anywhere (What.CD likes wildcat-based codenames)

brass92• 13 years ago

Is the ocelot code opensource? I'd be interested in it.

dewey8• 13 years ago

Yes, it's in the repository (https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/ocelot-0.6.tar...)

calpaterson3• 13 years ago

If you want to start a bittorrent tracker but don't want to bother with all of the trouble of things like Gazelle, you might like thehighseas, a straightforward bittorrent tracker I wrote:

https://github.com/calpaterson/thehighseas

dewey8• 13 years ago

That's a different league though. Gazelle provides a lot more than just listing torrents.

lysa• 13 years ago

I'm not sure about that. Feature-wise it might be in a different league but the code is absolutely horrible.

calpaterson3• 13 years ago

Absolutely, I just thought I'd mention it in case people want to get into bittorrent but want an easier way to get started

FZeroX8• 13 years ago

Gazelle isn't actually a tracker though - it's a web front-end / torrent website, but doesn't actually do the tracking part itself.

calpaterson3• 13 years ago

Thanks - but having written a bittorrent tracker + web interface, I'm aware of the distinction. Most people who want to set up something simple don't actually care though, and my hope is that thehighseas helps people get started sharing with friends.

kurrepalt2• 13 years ago

Cool, it's like watching how people did PHP 4-5 years ago when there weren't many frameworks available, and people used GLOBAL variables for accessing the DB/cache.

wdewind2• 13 years ago

https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/classes/wiki.c...

Yeah, not to be negative, but it literally has SQL and HTML in one file. Ooof.

kurrepalt2• 13 years ago

Yes, the thing I also noted first was that it doesn't have any bootstrap/router (only 'bootstrap' is the one that's included at the top of each .php-file, wordpress-style). Development must have been pure pain. :(

I really understand why people hate PHP so much when all they get to see is purely non-optimized shit. It generally has a really bad reputation which it doesn't deserve. Especially in HN-circles.

mercurial• 13 years ago

I guess coding standards where that locality trumped separation of concerns. Also, I find string interpolation in SQL kind of hot. Especially when magic quotes are deprecated.

I'm sure you can do nice things in PHP if you try hard enough, but you sure don't need to make any effort to do something absolutely terrible.

dewey8• 13 years ago

Well, the project is about 5 years old and grew over time. There were discussions about moving to a framework/a rewrite but that's something you can't pull of with < 5 developers while still keeping the current codebase up to date and fixing bugs.

FZeroX8• 13 years ago

It's not an age thing, the code we were writing was considered terrible back then too, and there were frameworks available. Wheel re-invention is fun though!

adamdavis• 13 years ago

I remember working with gazelle for a torrent site for live Phish recordings. Truly a terrifying code base.

FZeroX8• 13 years ago

I was an architect and coder on this project back at the very beginning and for a few years after launch, if you have any questions about the code then ask away :)

brass92• 13 years ago

I don't understand. Why is this on HN now? IIRC project Gazelle had been open-sourced several years ago.

dewey8• 13 years ago

Because they just started to mirror their own git to GitHub and the documentation is more accessible there than the internal wiki on a private tracker.

jzelinskie2• 13 years ago

There's pressure being put on Gazelle right now because Waffles and AnimeBytes are writing a replacement called Batter[1] using Django. I've also been working on a tracker in Go called Chihaya[2] that will replace Ocelot. I'm glad they finally opening things up more, but it might be a bit too late. If you're interested in working on a more modern rewrite of Gazelle's software stack that has actual software development practices (continuous integration, tests, style guidelines), check out the projects. Both projects are BSD 2 Clause, btw.

[1] https://github.com/wafflesfm/batter

[2] https://github.com/pushrax/chihaya

wcauchois• 13 years ago

thanks for the links. i gotta say though, your indentation style on chihaya is crackodactyl.

jzelinskie2• 13 years ago

It's only gofmt with lines <80 chars; there is a function call or two broken into multiple lines to meet that. I'm scrapping that limit and just going to make it as readable as possible. The real crazy thing is GitHub using 8 spaces for tabs!

MrDOS• 13 years ago

What's the motivation for replacing Ocelot? My understanding is that it's mostly a drop-in replacement for XBTT (please correct me if I'm wrong); is one of the design goals of Chihaya to modernize the API?

dustywusty• 13 years ago

This code's pretty riddled with SQL injection vulnerabilities. Can't imagine anyone recommending use of this for new projects.

For a single instance, https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/sections/user/...

The $UserId variable, which is used throughout the queries within this file, is set by an unfiltered GET variable.

deeebug• 13 years ago

Actually they check the $_GET['id'] variable, which is used to set the $UserId variable. Check the top of the source:

if (empty($_GET['id']) || !is_numeric($_GET['id']) || (!empty($_GET['preview']) && !is_numeric($_GET['preview']))) {

dfrey• 13 years ago

You must maintain a 0.4 ratio of pushes to pulls on github to use this repository.

What.cd's Gazelle on GitHub

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