Inspired by Farhad’s approach of bashpodder, as featured in a Linux Action Show episode about bash scripts, I decided to create a Podcast Server of my own.
b3caster, as I’m calling it is a podcast server based on dircaster and bashpodder.
The idea is to have a podcast server that downloads and feeds my favorite podcasts.
Components
b3caster needs the following components to work:
- Linux
- Web Server
- PHP
- cron
I’m using my B3 Server for this.
github
For this project I decided to create a github account. You can follow the evolution of b3caster there.
The Setup
- Copy the DirCaster version I provide in github, to your web server, for example:
/www/dircaster
- Copy all the scripts and config files to a folder in your server, for example:
/home/b3caster
- Go through all the scripts and change the necessary configs to adapt to your setup. I’m setting up a wiki in github to explain this better. In the meantime, if you look at the code it’s not hard to understand what to change.
- Have cron run the b3caster.sh script with the frequency you prefer, for example:
00 06 * * * /home/b3caster/b3caster.sh
And that’s it. Just point your favorite podcast client to http://yoursite.com/DirCaster/dircaster.php and your good to go.
Available scripts
- caster_zones.sh
A caster zone is what you consider being your podcast server. You can have many caster zones and a caster zone can have one or more podcasts.
All you need to do is change the caster_zones.conf file and add as many as you want.
- downloader.sh
This is the script that downloads all the podcasts. Add your favorite ones in the urls.conf file.
- subscriptions.sh
Here you configure what podcasts your caster zone have. Edit the subscriptions.conf file.
- b3caster.sh
This is the main script that runs in cron and creates the caster zones and copy the podcasts to each zone.
Next steps
This scripts may still have bugs and you may need to change some things to get things going. Follow me at github for changes in the scripts and feel free to comment, send ideas and open issues :)