Sentrychan

Your self-driving library for anime, manga and novels.

Tell it what you follow — it finds, downloads, names and files every new episode and chapter for you.

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What it does

Sentrychan is a Windows desktop app that manages a media library end to end: it watches RSS feeds for the series you follow, downloads new releases, renames and files them into Show / Season folders your media server already understands, and gives you a reader for everything that isn't video.

• Auto-download episodes — add a show, and new episodes arrive on their own, properly named and filed for Plex or Jellyfin. Set preferred release groups and it picks the right one when several publish the same episode.
• Downloads, your way — a built-in torrent engine (pause, resume, speed limits, queue), or point it at your own qBittorrent instance instead.
• Read manga and novels in-app (beta) — paged or webtoon scroll, online or downloaded for offline, with reading progress tracked. Already have chapters on disk? Point it at the folder and read those too.
• Stay current — a background monitor checks for new episodes and chapters and raises a Windows notification when they land.
• Discover — browse the current season, follow anime news, and see a live feed of new releases with seeds and size.
• Anime quiz and OP Battle Royale — guess the show from its opening, solo or last-one-standing.
• Tidy a messy library — import your MyAnimeList watching list, fill gaps in series you already own, and resolve files the matcher couldn't place.
• Make it yours — four themes (Yoru, Shiro, Sakura, Neon), sidebar or top-bar layout, custom background image.

Install

Grab the installer from the latest release. No account, no .NET to install — everything is bundled, and the app updates itself from then on.

Windows may warn you the first time. Sentrychan isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen on first launch. Click More info → Run anyway.

Manga and novels are in beta

The anime side is the mature half of Sentrychan. Manga and novel support — library, reader, offline downloads and progress tracking — works, but it is newer and rougher, and odd chapter numbering or an unusual source layout can still trip it up.

Feedback on it is genuinely wanted. Open an issue and include the series and source if you can; that's usually enough to reproduce a problem.

About online sources

Sentrychan is a library manager, downloader and reader, and it is not affiliated with any content site.

Manga and novel sources come from source packs — separate, third-party plug-in DLLs you import yourself from Settings → Library & Danger → Import source pack. They load on the next restart. This repository neither distributes nor links to them.

Everything else works without any of that: your existing files, your own folders of chapter images, RSS feeds you add, MyAnimeList import, the reader and the quiz.

Intended use

Sentrychan is built for organising a library you are entitled to hold: your own rips, public domain and Creative Commons works, freely distributed releases, and anything you have permission to download.

It is not intended for copyright infringement, and using it that way is neither supported nor endorsed. What you point it at, and whether that is lawful where you live, is your responsibility.

On the way

Sentrychan today is entirely local — there is nothing to sign up for, and the app never talks to a server of ours. These are being built but are not in the app yet:

• Watch parties — watch together in a shared room, in sync, without passing files around. Each room runs on a hosted machine, so this is the one feature that costs real money per hour of use.
• Cloud sync, friends and activity — one library across machines, plus realtime airing alerts.

Because they need a hosted backend, they'll arrive as supporter features. Everything currently in the app stays free.

There will always be an escape hatch: point the app at your own Supabase project, apply supabase/schema.sql, and the same features run against your own backend for nothing.

Note for contributors: IHyperbeamService is registered in DI but no view-model consumes it yet, and HyperbeamConfig.ApiKey ships as a placeholder. A real Hyperbeam key is a server secret that authorises billable VM creation — it must never be committed or compiled into a client build. Before watch parties ship, that call moves behind a Supabase Edge Function.

Supporting the project

The app is free and always will be. It will never be for sale — not a trial, not a licence, not a paywalled build, and supporting it will never get you more sources, faster downloads or any advantage in finding or fetching content.

Being straight about where contributions go: part goes to me, the developer, as payment for my time. Sentrychan is written by one person in evenings and weekends, and a project that pays for some of those evenings is one that still exists in two years. The rest covers real bills — a code-signing certificate (which removes the SmartScreen warning for everyone, supporter or not), hosted rooms for watch parties, and the database behind sync and alerts.

If you would rather not fund hosting at all, run it yourself against your own Supabase project. That escape hatch is deliberate and will not be closed.

Building from source

Requires the .NET 9 SDK.

git clone https://github.com/D4Ron/Sentrychan.git
cd Sentrychan
dotnet build Sentrychan.sln
dotnet run --project Sentrychan.App

Project layout

Project	Role
Sentrychan.Core	Services, EF Core (SQLite), models, interfaces. No UI dependencies.
Sentrychan.UI	Avalonia 11 views and ReactiveUI view-models.
Sentrychan.App	Composition root, DI wiring, plugin loading.

This repository contains no sources. Source packs are separate, third-party plug-ins: a DLL placed in %APPDATA%\Sentrychan\sources is loaded by reflection at startup, and implements the contracts in Sentrychan.Core/Interfaces (IMangaSourceService, IReleaseProvider, IAiringScheduleService). The client never compiles a source's types in. The build is source-less by default:

dotnet publish Sentrychan.App -p:IncludeSources=false

Local state lives in %APPDATA%\Sentrychan\ — the SQLite database, logs, image cache and imported source packs.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. A few things worth knowing before you start:

• The source-pack separation is deliberate and load-bearing. Please don't compile sources into the client.
• Series (anime, episodes) and Manga (chapters, reading progress) are deliberately separate models. Novels are Manga with IsNovel = true.
• Comments explain why, not what. Match the density of the code around them.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

If you run a modified version of Sentrychan as a network service, the AGPL requires you to offer that modified source to its users.

Acknowledgements

Built with Avalonia, MonoTorrent, ReactiveUI and Velopack. Metadata from Jikan (MyAnimeList), AnitomySharp and the anime-offline-database.

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Sentrychan is a general-purpose library manager and download client. It hosts no content and is not affiliated with any content site. It is not intended for copyright infringement. You are responsible for what you point it at and for complying with the laws that apply to you.