Name: filebot

Last reviewed by: Clipper, April 2026

FileBot

FileBot is a tool for organizing and renaming movies, TV shows, anime and music, as well as downloading subtitles and artwork. It integrates with databases such as TheTVDB and TheMovieDB to identify content and rename it in a format that Plex can recognize.

Note: FileBot is no longer the default post-processing tool on Bytesized. Since December 2019, olaris-rename is the default for all new installations. FileBot remains available as an installable app for users who purchase a licence. If your box was deployed after December 2019 and you have not manually installed FileBot, this page is not relevant to your setup.

See Filebot and olaris-rename for a comparison and migration guide.

Changelog

April 2026 — Reviewed by Clipper. Updated to reflect current default (olaris-rename) and Filebot licence requirements.

14th November 2019 — FileBot is no longer the default app. olaris-rename is now the default.

3rd November 2019 — Added a note about FileBot licensing.

14th June 2016 — Added note about manual parsing script.

30th April 2015 — Added extraction prompt during installation.

13th February 2015 — Disabled automatic extraction by default. Can be re-enabled by changing skipExtract=y to skipExtract=n in the wrapper file.

24th July 2014 — Enabled automatic English subtitle downloads.

19th July 2014 — Added to Bytesized.

What does FileBot do?

When a download completes, Deluge calls FileBot to process the files. FileBot will:

Check if the content is compressed (rar, zip, 7z) and extract it if extraction is enabled. Plex cannot read rar'd files natively — extraction makes the content available in a path Plex is watching.
Look up the content on known databases (TheTVDB, TheMovieDB, etc.).
Create a symlink in ~/media/ with a Plex-compatible name. For example Friends.S06E03.mkv becomes ~/media/TV Shows/Friends/Season 06/Friends - S06E03.mkv.

A symlink is like a shortcut — no extra disk space is used, and renaming the symlink does not affect the original file or interrupt seeding.

Note: When you remove a torrent from Deluge, the symlink FileBot created in ~/media/ is not automatically removed. You will need to delete it manually via FTP or SSH.

Installing the licence

FileBot requires a paid licence. Purchase one from the FileBot website and install it via the Install Application button on your Appbox dashboard. Paste the complete licence text in the licence data field during installation.

Imgur

The licence must be pasted in full and in the correct multi-line format — a single-line paste or partial content will not be accepted.

To verify the licence is correctly installed:

filebot -script fn:sysinfo

The output should contain something like:

License: FileBot License XXXXXXX (Valid-Until: YYYY-MM-DD)

Wrapper files

Bytesized provides wrapper scripts that are called by Deluge and rTorrent on torrent completion:

Client	Wrapper location
Deluge	`~/.config/deluge/filebot.py`
rTorrent	`~/.config/rtorrent/filebot`

Using FileBot as the Deluge post-processing script

The default post-processing script for Deluge calls olaris-rename. To switch to FileBot, edit ~/.config/deluge/filebot.py and in the call_filebot() function, replace the cmd variable assignment with:

cmd = ("filebot -script fn:amc -non-strict --def ut_kind=multi --log all --log-file amc.log --def ut_dir=\"%s/%s\" " % (sys.argv[3], sys.argv[2]) + ' '.join(filebotOptions)).encode(u'utf-8')

You must also update the output path in the filebotOptions list near the top of the script. The default is media (relative), which resolves to ~/torrents/data/media — incorrect. Change it to ~/media.

Tips and tricks

Manually parse a folder or files

To force FileBot to scan content you uploaded manually, run one of the following from your home directory:

# Automatic detection (recommended)
cd && filebotify ~/torrents/data/filepath

# Using the Deluge wrapper
python ~/.config/deluge/filebot.py nothing . ~/torrents/data/my-folder

# Using the Deluge wrapper with a path containing spaces
python ~/.config/deluge/filebot.py nothing . ~/torrents/data/"Path To your DIR with Spaces - (Wrapped in quotes)/"

# Using the rTorrent wrapper
bash ~/.config/rtorrent/filebot ~/path/to/containing/folder filename.mkv

Checking what FileBot is doing

If symlinks are not being created, check the log file:

~/.filebot/logs/amc.log

Manually creating symlinks

If FileBot misses a file you can create a symlink manually. Navigate to the target directory (e.g. ~/media/Movies) and run:

ln -s ../../torrents/data/your-folder/your-file

Important: Use a relative path (../../) rather than an absolute path (/home/username/). Plex runs in a container and cannot follow absolute symlinks from outside its mount points.

For paths containing spaces, the most reliable approach is to cd into the source directory first and use $PWD to build an absolute path:

cd ~/torrents/data/"Name of your folder (with Spaces)"/
ln -s "$PWD/Name of the Movie (to link).mkv" ~/media/Movies/

This avoids both space-handling issues and symlink resolution problems.

Enabling small file and short video recognition

By default FileBot ignores files under 50MB and videos under 10 minutes. To process all files regardless of size or length, add these options to your FileBot configuration:

--def minFileSize=0
--def minLengthMS=0

Fixing the extractFolder option

A FileBot upgrade changed the case sensitivity of the extraction folder option. If extraction is not working, edit your wrapper file and change:

--def extractfolder

to:

--def extractFolder

Subtitles

To turn off subtitle downloading, edit your wrapper file and change en to false for the SUBLANG (rTorrent) or subtitles (Deluge) option.

To download subtitles in multiple languages, separate language codes with a comma:

subtitles=en,fr,nl