Indexers

Indexers are where kino looks when you ask for a film or series. Every search fans out across all enabled indexers in parallel, deduplicates the results, scores each release against your quality profile, and grabs the best match.

Kino supports two indexer kinds:

• Built-in definitions — 500+ community-maintained YAML definitions (the same ones Prowlarr ships) interpreted directly inside the kino binary. No second service to run.
• Torznab endpoints — any URL that speaks the Torznab API. Use this if you already run Prowlarr or Jackett, or if you want to bring an indexer kino doesn’t ship a definition for.

You can mix both kinds freely. Most installs add two or three built-in definitions and call it done.

Add a built-in indexer

1. Open Settings → Indexers and click Add indexer.

2. Pick Built-in definition. The picker shows a searchable list of every indexer kino has a definition for — type the site name to filter.

3. Select the one you want. Kino renders the settings the definition declares — usually nothing for public sites, or a username and password for semi-private and private ones.

4. Fill in any required settings. Cookie logins (where the tracker doesn’t accept username/password over the API) take a raw cookie string pasted from your browser’s developer tools.

5. Click Test. Kino runs a search for test against the site and verifies it gets parseable results back. Save when the test passes.

The new row appears in the indexer list with a green dot if the last health check succeeded. Subsequent searches include it automatically.

Definitions auto-update

Kino refreshes its definition cache from the upstream Prowlarr/Indexers repository once a day. New sites become available without a kino update; existing ones pick up parser fixes when trackers change their HTML.

You don’t need to do anything to opt in — the cache lives under {data_path}/definitions/ and refreshes in the background.

Add a Torznab endpoint

If you already run Prowlarr (or Jackett, or any compatible service), add it as a Torznab indexer instead.

1. Settings → Indexers → Add indexer → Torznab URL.

2. Paste the Torznab URL and API key. For Prowlarr, this is the per-indexer URL of the form:

   http://<prowlarr-host>:9696/<id>/api?apikey=<key>

   Each Prowlarr-managed indexer has its own URL — copy it from Prowlarr’s Apps → Sync Profiles page or the per-indexer detail view.

3. (Optional) Set a Priority — lower numbers are tried first when the same release appears on multiple indexers. The default priority of 25 is fine; raise to 50 for slow indexers, drop to 10 for your fastest.

4. Test to verify the URL is reachable and the API key is valid. Save.

Capabilities are auto-detected

On the first health check, kino calls the Torznab t=caps endpoint and caches what each indexer supports — TV-search vs movie-search, which ID parameters (IMDB, TMDB, TVDB) are accepted, and which categories are served. Search queries are tailored to each indexer’s declared capabilities, so you don’t waste API calls on parameters the server would silently ignore.

Indexer health

Each indexer has a status badge in the list:

Badge	Meaning
Healthy	Last search returned within the timeout, no errors
Degraded	One or more recent searches failed; still queried, but with an escalation backoff
Disabled	Repeated failures — kino has temporarily stopped including it in searches

Disabled indexers re-enter the rotation automatically when their backoff window expires (1 hour → 6 hours → 24 hours). You can force a retry by clicking Test on the indexer’s row.

A search that fails on one indexer does not block the others. Each indexer runs in its own concurrent task; one slow site adds latency only to itself, not to the whole search.

Priority and dedup

The same release often appears on several public indexers with identical content but different URLs. Kino deduplicates these based on torrent info-hash:

• The first sighting (from the highest-priority indexer that carries it) is kept.
• Subsequent duplicates are dropped silently.
• Releases without an info-hash (rare) pass through unchanged.

So setting priorities matters when the same content is mirrored — your low-priority-number indexers get credit for shared releases.

Cloudflare-protected sites

Some private trackers gate their site behind Cloudflare’s interactive challenges. Kino ships a two-stage solver that handles most of these automatically:

1. A TLS-fingerprint-aware HTTP client passes “look like a real browser” challenges without launching anything heavy.
2. If that fails, kino can launch a headless Camoufox (Firefox-fork) instance via Node + Playwright to complete the challenge and extract the resulting cookies.

The headless-browser stage is opt-in and only runs when the TLS-only pass returns a challenge page. Public trackers and TLS-simple private trackers don’t need it on disk at all.

If Cloudflare bypass is failing for your tracker, you can run FlareSolverr as an external service and add it to kino’s indexer settings — the same escape hatch Prowlarr uses.

Categories and search modes

Built-in definitions and Torznab indexers both advertise category mappings. Kino uses these automatically:

Search type	Category	Notes
Movies	Movies (2000–2999)	Year is appended to the query for disambiguation
TV episode	TV (5000–5999)	Season + episode supplied as separate parameters
TV season pack	TV (5000–5999)	Detected by parsing the release title

You don’t configure categories per indexer — kino picks the right ones based on what you’re searching for and what each indexer declares it serves.

Search behaviour

Searches happen automatically on three triggers:

• On request — when you add a film or follow a series, kino searches immediately. No waiting for a polling cycle.
• On air date — when a series episode’s air date arrives, kino searches for it.
• Periodic sweep — every 15 minutes by default (auto_search_interval in Settings → Downloads), kino re-runs searches for content that hasn’t found a match yet.

Content that’s been wanted for a long time without results is searched less often (1 hour → 6 hours → 24 hours bands), so you’re not hammering your indexers for things they don’t have.

You can always force a search from the film or episode detail page — the Search button bypasses the cycle and runs immediately.

Respect indexer rules

Kino doesn’t editorialise on what you index, but the tracker on the other side might. Public-tracker rate limits, private-tracker ratio rules, and indexer terms of service are between you and the tracker — kino just sends the queries you tell it to.

Troubleshooting

Test button fails immediately: the URL or API key is wrong, or the indexer is unreachable from the kino host. Try opening the URL in a browser from the same machine.

Test passes but real searches return nothing: the indexer’s search endpoint may need different parameters than the test query. Check Activity → Logs — kino logs the per-indexer query URL and result counts at debug level.

Built-in definition for site X is missing: kino fetches definitions from the upstream Prowlarr/Indexers repo. If the site isn’t there, neither tool has it. Open an issue in that repo to request a new definition.

A definition stopped working after a tracker UI change: definitions are community-maintained. Once the upstream PR lands, kino’s daily refresh picks it up — usually within a day. To force an early refresh, restart kino.

Cloudflare-protected site keeps failing: see Troubleshooting for the FlareSolverr fallback path. Some sites have raised the bar beyond what either the built-in solver or FlareSolverr handles reliably.

For anything else, the Troubleshooting FAQ covers the rest.