About Bitmagnet
Bitmagnet is a self-hosted BitTorrent indexer and search engine. Its distinguishing feature is a DHT crawler: rather than relying on a central tracker, it crawls the distributed hash table, requests metadata for each torrent hash it finds, and builds its own searchable index that you run yourself.
After collecting metadata, bitmagnet tries to classify each torrent and link it to known content such as movies and TV shows. You can search everything it has found through a web interface or a GraphQL API, and a Torznab-compatible endpoint lets it plug into the Servarr stack of tools such as Prowlarr, Radarr and Sonarr. Documentation also covers importing, backups, reclassifying and observability.
The project is written in Go and released under the MIT licence. It is run on your own server, usually with Docker, and its website states plainly that the software is in alpha, so bugs and changes to the API and database schema are likely before a 1.0 release. It suits home-lab users who want a private torrent search index.
Key features
- DHT network crawler for torrent metadata
- Content classifier for movies and TV
- Web UI with full-text search
- GraphQL API access
- Torznab endpoint for Servarr tools
- Backup, restore, and import options
Good fit for
- →Running a private torrent search index
- →Feeding Sonarr and Radarr with a self-hosted source
- →Experimenting with DHT crawling in a home lab
- Built with
- Go
- Tags
- bittorrent
- dht
- torrent
- search-engine
- self-hosted
- servarr
- graphql
- go
- indexer
Bitmagnet: questions and answers
- What is Bitmagnet used for?
- Bitmagnet is a self-hosted BitTorrent indexer that crawls the DHT network, classifies content and offers search through a web UI, GraphQL API and Servarr integration. It is a good fit for running a private torrent search index, feeding Sonarr and Radarr with a self-hosted source, and experimenting with DHT crawling in a home lab.
- Is Bitmagnet open source?
- Yes. Bitmagnet is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet and is written mainly in Go.
- Is Bitmagnet free?
- Yes. Bitmagnet is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Bitmagnet?
- Yes. Bitmagnet can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What are some alternatives to Bitmagnet?
- Similar open-source tools in the Search category include SearXNG, Morphic and Hister. SaaS products in the same category include Baidu, Bing and Brave Search.
- Is Bitmagnet actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Bitmagnet was on 11 August 2026, and the latest release is v0.10.0, published on 2 March 2025. The project has 4.4k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to Bitmagnet
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SaaS alternatives to Bitmagnet
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Baidu
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Bing
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Microsoft web search engine with image search and Copilot answers
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Brave Search
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DuckDuckGo
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Ecosia
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Google Programmable Search Engine
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Service for adding a custom Google-powered search box to a website
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