What is NNTmux?

This Laravel-based Usenet indexer automatically scans Usenet groups, retrieves headers, and organizes content into searchable releases. It runs header retrieval, release creation, and post-processing in parallel threads via a tmux engine. The software offers advanced search by name, subject, category, and post date, plus intelligent metadata caching from TMDB, TVDB, TVMaze, Trakt, and IMDB with fallback support. A modern web frontend uses Vite, Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, and Livewire. Full-text search works through ManticoreSearch or Elasticsearch. The newznab-compatible REST API integrates with Sonarr, Radarr, and similar download clients. IRC pre-channel scraping and PreDB APIs provide early release data. Deployment options include bare metal on Ubuntu 24.04 with Ansible, Docker via Laravel Sail, and cloud on AWS, Hetzner, or OVH using Terraform. Requirements are PHP 8.4+, MariaDB 10.6+ or MySQL 8+, Redis, and optionally tmux for multi-threaded processing.

Should you self-host NNTmux?

NNTmux scores 51/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #25 of 45 in Download Management. It has 302 GitHub stars.

It shipped 1 stable release in the past year. The latest, 4.2, came out on 22 January 2026.

Setup is advanced: plan for several services and some ongoing maintenance. It is GPL-3.0-licensed and written mostly in PHP.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is cobalt (83/100, 45 586 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See NNTmux vs cobalt side by side.