Is ani-cli safe?

2026-05-17 06:09 UTC

This CLI program seems to work well, but since it is a binary I can’t see what it is (presumably) streaming torrents from. It’s easy and fast and has an extensive library, which is good. I’m not good enough at coding to dig through the git repo to really determine if this is safe. So, while this tool seems to do what it describes - I can’t monitor traffic at all (if you have a way to do that on Arch, please let me know!). Most of the Megathread is safe torrent sites, so I have no idea if this is pulling from those. Again, it does work, and easily - but I have no clue what the traffic is doing.

Replies (4)

@riwo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-05-17 08:54

according to the readme.md in the git repo, it scrapes its info from allmanga.to. allmanga includes direct downloads as well as torrents though, so this is not very helpful. looking into the script itself, this seems to be the code where it picks the download url as far as i can tell, none of the listed providers here hosts torrents. so the resulting link should always be a direct torrent. it looks like when u play an episode with the script, the url is directly put into your player, with afaict none of the listed players supporting torrent streaming/downloading. when downloading the episode, it can use the program aria2c as a downloader and that program does support torrent downloads, but all of the options used when running aria inply that its run on an http url not a torrent. with all of this, id make an educated guess, that the script at no point downloads any torrents. i am not 100% certain, because i’m not good with bash and this script is confusing to me >.<

Open ##2672635
@mycodesucks@lemmy.world 2026-05-17 09:57

It’s absolutely unsafe. I ran it on my machine, and the next thing I knew, it was 4 days later and I knew what a Zaku was.

Open ##2673215
@anothercatgirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-05-17 07:39

if you’re worried, run it on someone else’s computer like at the library.

Open ##2674362
@mcmodknower@programming.dev 2026-05-17 08:03

its part of the Debian packages (https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ani-cli&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all), as well as some other distros packages, which is a huge green flag for me. in the top of their readme it says “This tool scrapes the site allmanga.”, so you should take a look at that site for more info on how it gets the anime.

Open ##2985564