Automation

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Automatically refresh the library when downloads finish

Many clients, notably Transmission, can call a script when downloads finish. Meanwhile, Kodi can be controlled via the HTTP API in many ways, including to refresh the library. You can combine all this to automatically call a clean and update of the library when a download has finished.

First, make sure that remote control over HTTP is allowed, via Settings → Service settings → Control → Allow control of Kodi via HTTP → ON.

Now, save a script file somewhere (ex. ~/bin/kodi-library-refresh.sh) with the following contents, editing the variables at the start for your setup:

#!/bin/bash

# Change these values to yours if you aren't just blithely using Kodi's default settings
USERNAME="kodi"
PASSWORD="kodi"
HOSTNAME="localhost"
PORT="8080"

# First, we scan for new items
curl --data-binary '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "VideoLibrary.Scan", "id": "mybash"}' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}@${HOSTNAME}:${PORT}/jsonrpc
curl --data-binary '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "AudioLibrary.Scan", "id": "mybash"}' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}@${HOSTNAME}:${PORT}/jsonrpc
# Now, we clean up anything that's no longer available
curl --data-binary '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "VideoLibrary.Clean", "id": "mybash"}' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}@${HOSTNAME}:${PORT}/jsonrpc
curl --data-binary '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "AudioLibrary.Clean", "id": "mybash"}' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}@${HOSTNAME}:${PORT}/jsonrpc

Make sure to make this script executable. From the terminal, chmod +x ~/bin/kodi-library-refresh.sh (or you can probably right-click and go into properties in your file manager of choice).

Now just open Transmission and go to Edit → Preferences → Downloading → Incomplete → Call script when torrent is completed and point that setting towards your script, et voila!

Refresh and clean the library periodically

If you've saved the script above and made it executable, you could also just run it on a schedule, too. Probably the best way would be via your user crontab, which you can edit:

• via crontab -e from a terminal to edit your crontab directly with a text editor
• or via your desktop environment's task scheduler
  • For KDE, this should be called Task Scheduler and if not already available on your system, this KCM module can be installed via sudo apt install kde-config-cron on Debian/Ubuntu systems.
  • For GNOME systems apparently nobody maintains the equivalent GUI for GNOME anymore, so you'll have to use one of the above options.

If you're going the direct crontab editing route, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto for more information, or just cargo-cult copy the following entry into your crontab (having opened it up for editing via crontab -e) to get it to run twice a day:

# Will run the Kodi library refresh script twice a day
0 */12 * * *       ${HOME}/bin/kodi-library-refresh.sh > /tmp/kodi-library-refresh.log

You could also copy the kodi-library-refresh.sh script to /etc/cron.daily to just get it to run once every day, or even /etc/cron.hourly for every hour (again, make sure it's set as executable, otherwise it will not be run).

Take screenshots from a script

#!/bin/bash

# Change these values to yours if you aren't just blithely using Kodi's default settings
USERNAME="kodi"
PASSWORD="kodi"
HOSTNAME="localhost"
PORT="8080"

# First time (per session?) it'll prompt for a folder to use, future invocations will result in screenshots in that same folder
curl --data-binary '{ "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Input.ExecuteAction", "params": {"action":"screenshot"}, "id": "screenshot-script"}' -H 'content-type: application/json;' http://${USERNAME}:${PASSWORD}@${HOSTNAME}:${PORT}/jsonrpc