Podgrab

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 783 words

Podgrab does one job: you paste RSS feeds, it downloads every new episode to a folder you own, and it serves them back through a plain web page you can play from. It runs in a container that idles under 128 MB of RAM, and the whole setup is 5 minutes. The catch, and you should know it before you invest, is that the project has been quiet for a long time. It still works, because RSS and MP3 files do not change, but nobody is adding features, and you should treat it as finished software rather than growing software.

Who actually runs it

Podgrab is an archiver first and a player second. The people who run it are the ones who have lost episodes before: a show goes dark, a host pulls the back catalogue, a feed moves behind a paywall. If you want a copy of every episode of 30 shows sitting on your NAS, sorted into folders, that is the exact shape of this tool. It is not a replacement for a phone app. The web player is fine on a laptop, there is no mobile app, and there is no sync of listening position across devices. Pocket Casts users hoping for the same experience on their own hardware will be disappointed; the Pocket Casts switching guide covers what actually replaces the app side.

The 5-minute compose file

services:
  podgrab:
    image: akhilrex/podgrab
    environment:
      - CHECK_FREQUENCY=240
      - PASSWORD=change-me
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./assets:/assets
    restart: unless-stopped

CHECK_FREQUENCY is in minutes; 240 means feeds get polled 6 times a day, which is plenty for weekly shows. Setting PASSWORD turns on HTTP basic auth with the username podgrab, and you want that on even inside your LAN because the UI can delete downloads with one click. /config holds the SQLite database and /assets is where the audio lands, so put /assets on the big disk and /config somewhere that gets backed up. The web UI is on port 8080. Import an OPML export from your current app on the settings page and downloads start on the first poll.

Disk fills faster than you expect

A weekly one-hour show at 128 kbps is about 55 MB an episode, roughly 2.9 GB a year. Subscribe to 30 shows and tell it to fetch the full back catalogue for each and you can commit 100 GB before lunch. Podgrab lets you choose per feed whether to pull the whole archive or only episodes from now on, and there is a cap on how many episodes to keep per show. Decide that on the day you add each feed, because retroactively deleting is a manual chore. I keep 3 shows on "everything" because I care about their archives and the rest on a short cap.

What the quiet repository means in practice

The upstream repository sits at about 1,991 stars and has had very little activity for years. Concretely that means: the feed parser will not learn new tricks (chapters, transcripts and the newer podcast namespace tags are ignored), the base image is not being refreshed, and if a feed does something odd, nobody is going to fix it. None of this stops it working today. It does mean you should run it on an internal network rather than exposed to the internet, and you should not build a workflow around it that you cannot move.

Moving is easy, which is the saving grace. Episodes are plain MP3 files in named folders under /assets. Point any media server at that directory and the archive outlives the app.

Audiobookshelf is the bigger sibling

If you want the player side done properly, Audiobookshelf has podcast support with auto-download, real mobile apps for iOS and Android, per-user progress sync, and an actively maintained codebase at many times the stars. It wants more RAM (budget 512 MB) and it is a bigger thing to run, but for most people it is the correct answer in the media server category. Podgrab wins only on footprint and simplicity: one container, one job, nothing to learn.

What I'd do

Run Podgrab if your goal is an archive on a small box and you already have a phone app you like. Set every feed to a short cap except the few you genuinely want to preserve, put /assets on the NAS, and let it poll every 4 hours. If you want to actually listen through the server, on the phone, with progress that follows you, skip it and set up Audiobookshelf instead; it does everything Podgrab does plus the parts Podgrab never got to.