Stash Watcher

Plugins Other Projects
,
1

:red_exclamation_mark: Notice
If you are the author of this project, you can claim this topic by clicking > at the bottom of this post. Select Something Else as a reason and leave a comment explaining you want to claim the topic. Include a link to your git profile or pull request showing ownership of the project.
:placard: Summary Stash Watcher is a service that watches your Stash library directories for changes and then triggers a Metadata Scan when new files are added to those directories. It then waits a period of time before triggering another scan to keep Stash from constantly scanning if you’re making many changes. Note that updates are watched during that window; the update is merely delayed.
:link: Repository https://github.com/stashapp/CommunityScripts/tree/main/scripts/stash-watcher

Stash Watcher

Stash Watcher is a service that watches your Stash library directories for changes and then triggers a Metadata Scan when new files are added to those directories. It then waits a period of time before triggering another scan to keep Stash from constantly scanning if you’re making many changes. Note that updates are watched during that window; the update is merely delayed.

Configuration

Modify a config.toml for your environment. The defaults match the Stash docker defaults, so they may work for you. You are likely to have to update Paths and possibly ApiKey. Check out default.toml for all configurable options. You can configure:

  • Url (host, domain, port)
  • Api Key (if your Stash is password protected)
  • Paths
  • Timeout - the minimum time between Metadata Scans
  • Scan options - The options for the Metadata Scan
  • Enable Polling - see SMB/CIFS Shares

Running Stash Watcher

You can run Stash Watcher directly from the command line or from inside docker.

Running directly with python

The directs below are for linux, but they should work on other operating systems.

Step 0: Create a Virtual Environment (optional, but recommended)

python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate

Step 1: Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Step 2: Create/Modify Configuration

Following the directions in Configuration, modify config.toml if necessary.

Step 3: Execute

python watcher.py path_to_config.toml

That’s it. Now when you make changes to watched directories, Stash Watcher will make an API call to trigger a metadata scan.

Running with docker

There is currently no published docker image, so you’ll have to build it yourself. The easiest way to do this is with docker compose:

version: "3.4"
services:
  stash-watcher:
    container_name: stash-watcher
    build: <path_to_stash-watcher_directory>
    volumes:
      #This is only required if you have to modify config.toml (if the defaults are fine you don't have to map this file)
      - ./config.toml:/config.toml:ro
      #This is the path to your stash content.  If you have multiple paths, map them here
      - /stash:/data:ro
    restart: unless-stopped

Then you can run

docker compose up -d --build

To start the watcher.

Notes

SMB/CIFS shares

The library (watchdog) that Stash Watcher uses has some limitations when dealing with SMB/CIFS shares. If you encounter some problems, set PollInterval in your config.toml. This is a lot less efficient than the default mechanism, but is more likely to work.

In my testing (this is from Windows to a share on another machine), if the machine running Stash Watcher wrote to the share, then the normal watcher worked fine. However, if a different machine wrote to the share, then Stash Watcher did not see the write unless I used Polling.