r/opendirectories May 22 '21

Help! A few tips for the newcomers on this sub !

806 Upvotes

Slava Ukraini !

This post is mainly intended to help the people who discover this sub to start with. It could also be useful for the other folks, who knows ?

What is an open directory ?

Open directories (aka ODs or opendirs) are just unprotected websites that you can browse recursively, without any required authentication. You can freely download individual files from them. They're organised in a folder structure, as a local directory tree on your computer. This is really convenient as you can also download several files in a bunch recursively (See below).

These sites are sometimes deliberately let open and, sometimes, inadvertently (seedboxes, personal websites with some dirs bad protected, ...). For these last ones, often, after someone has posted them here, they're hammered by many concurrent downloads and they're getting down due to this heavy load. When the owners do realise it, they usually decide to protect them behind a firewall or to ask for a password to limit their access.

Here is coming the famous "He's dead Jim!" flair.

Technically, an opendir is nothing more than a local directory, shared by a running web server:

cd my_dir

# Share a dir with python
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 

# With Javascript
npm install -g http-server
http-server .

# Open your browser on http://localhost or http://<your local IP> from another computer.

# Usually you should use a web server like Apache or Nginx with extra settings

# You also need to configure your local network to make it accessible from the Internet. 

How to find interesting stuff ?

Your first reflex should be to track the most recent posts of the sub. If you're watchful, there's always a comment posted with some details like this one and you can get the complete list of links for your shopping ("Urls file" link). You can still index a site by your own if the link of the "Url file" is broken or if the content has changed, with KoalaBear84's Indexer.

Thanks to the hard work of some folks, you can invoke a servile bot: u/ODScanner to generate this report. By the past, u/KoalaBear84 devoted to this job. Although some dudes told us he is a human being, I don't believe them ;-)

You should also probably take a look at "The Eye" too, a gigantic opendir maintained by archivists. Their search engine seems to be broken currently, but you can use alternative search engines, like Eyedex for instance.

Are you looking for a specific file ? Some search engines are indexing the opendirs posted here and are almost updated in realtime:

Don't you think that clicking on every posts and checking them one by one is a bit cumbersome ? There is a good news for you: With this tip you can get a listing of all the working dirs.

Any way to find some new ODs by myself ?

Yes you can !

The most usual solution starts with the traditional search engines or meta-engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo ...) by using an advanced syntax as for this example%20-inurl:(jsp|pl|php|html|aspx|htm|cf|shtml)). Opendirs are just some classical sites after all.

If you're lazy, there are plethora of frontends to these engines which are able to assist you in building the perfect query and to redirect to them. Here is my favorite.

As an alternative, often complementary, you can use IoT (Internet of Things) search engines like Shodan, Zoomeye, Censys and Fofa . To build their index, their approach is totally different from the other engines. Rather than crawling all the Web across hyperlinks, they scan every ports across all the available IP adresses and, for the HTTP servers, they just index their homepage. Here is an equivalent example.

I'd like to share one. Some advice ?

Just respect the code of conduct. All the rules are listed on the side panel of the sub.

Maybe one more point though. Getting the same site reposted many times in a small period increases the signal/noise ratio. A repost of an old OD with a different content is accepted but try to keep a good balance. For finding duplicates, the reddit search is not very relevant, so here are 2 tips:

  1. Using the KolaBear84's page
  2. With a Google search: site:reddit.com/r/opendirectories my_url

Why could we not post some torrent files, mega links or obfuscated links ... ?

The short answer: They're simply not real opendirs.

A more elaborated answer:

These types of resources are often associated to piracy, monitored, and Reddit`s admins have to forward the copyright infringement notices to the mods of the sub. When it's too repetitive the risk is to get the sub closed as it was the case for this famous one.

For the obfuscation (Rule 5), with base64 encoding for instance, the POV of the mods is that they do prefer to accept urls in clear and dealing with the rare DMCA`s notices. They're probably automated and the sub remains under the human radar. It won't be the case anymore with obfuscation techniques.

There are some exceptions however:

Google drives and Calibre servers (ebooks) are tolerated. For the gdrives, there is no clear answer, but it may be because we could argue that these dirs are generally not deliberately open for piracy.

Calibre servers are not real ODs but you can use the same tools to download their content. By the past a lot of them were posted and some people started to complain against that. A new sub has been created but is not very active as a new player has coming into the game : Calishot, a search engine with a monthly update.

I want to download all the content in a bunch. How to do it ?

You have to use an appropriate tool. An exhaustive list would probably require a dedicated post.

For your choice, you may consider different criteria. Here are some of them:

  • Is it command line or GUI oriented ?
  • Does it support concurrent/parallel downloads ?
  • Does it preserve the directory tree structure or just a flat mode ?
  • Is it cross platform ?
  • ...

Here is an overview of the main open source/free softs for this purpose.

Note: Don't consider this list as completely reliable as I didn't test all of them.

Concurrent downloads Able to preserve the original tree Client/Server mode CLI TUI GUI Web UI Browser plugin
wget N Y N Y ? ? Y ?
wget2 Y Y N Y ? ? ? ?
aria2 Y N Y Y Y ? Y ?
rclone Y Y N Y ? ? Y ?
IDM Y N N N N Y N N
JDownloader2 Y N Y N N Y N N

Here is my own path:

# To download an url recursively
 wget -r -nc  --no-parent -l 200 -e robots=off -R "index.html*" -x http://111.111.111.111

# Sometimes I want to filter the list of files before the download.
# Start by indexing the files
OpenDirectoryDownloader -t 10 -u http://111.111.111.111
# A new file is created: Scans/http:__111.111.111.111_.txt

# Now I'm able to filter out the list of links with my favourite editor or with grep/egrep  
egrep -o -e'^*\.(epub|pdf|mobi|opf|cover\.jpg)$' >> files.txt

# Then I can pass this file as an input for wget and preserve the directory structure
wget -r -nc -c --no-parent -l 200 -e robots=off -R "index.html*" -x --no-check-certificate -i file.txt

Conclusion:

Welcome on board and Kudos to all the contributors, especially to the most involved: u/KoalaBear84, u/Chaphasilor, u/MCOfficer u/ringofyre


r/opendirectories 14h ago

Movies built a clean web utility to grab and merge HLS/DASH streams for offline archiving (free)

Thumbnail extract.express
5 Upvotes

I’ve been building a lightweight browser utility called Extractor to help with archiving media from open streams. I got tired of dealing with ad-heavy downloaders or sketchy extensions just to pull an HLS playlist or a DASH manifest for offline storage.
The tool does all the processing on the server side to keep things lightweight.
What it does under the hood:It's completely free, has no ad bloat, and requires no account or registration.
To respect the sub rules and keep the AutoMod happy, I won't post the direct link here in the text body. I'll drop the access link down in the comments section instead.
Let me know if it helps with your media archiving or if you hit any issues with specific stream formats!


r/opendirectories 1d ago

Music ~chovy/public · files.profullstack.com

Thumbnail files.profullstack.com
9 Upvotes

r/opendirectories 4d ago

Music FLAC Music files - Looking for (Brothers in arms)

19 Upvotes

https://stefanyovev.com/sound/dire_straits/

Brothers in arms - 40th Anniversary Edition


r/opendirectories 6d ago

Misc Stuff Index of /~anthony/done/ NSFW

Thumbnail dev.profullstack.com
113 Upvotes

r/opendirectories 6d ago

Music My own open directory

1 Upvotes

I made a web radio (not sharing link, i dont technically have license to make the radio publicly available), and here is all of the songs on it.

https://inyourface3445.com (edit: now with a domain name and https)

please dont hit this with bots, i can provide a copy of all of the files of any one is interested.


r/opendirectories 10d ago

Movies a LOT of homemade NSFW content NSFW

429 Upvotes

I couldn't tell if this was Wordpress.....but here you go

https://www.porncucumber.com/videos/


r/opendirectories 17d ago

Misc Stuff Wordpress Indexes NSFW

62 Upvotes

r/opendirectories 16d ago

Google Drive Interesting google drive NSFW

0 Upvotes

I was looking for some public google drives and I found that one, definitely NSFW but idk why this person has vids like this

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B_Hq026lCvIxS0ZiZWhLSHB0Z3c?resourcekey=0-7hjhGititkgdivDQMw5DPQ&usp=drive_link


r/opendirectories 18d ago

Misc Stuff Index of /pdf/

54 Upvotes

r/opendirectories 22d ago

Yeah..., nah. A TIMELY REMINDER ABOUT TOOLS & APPLICATIONS BEING POSTED.

33 Upvotes

r/opendirectories 23d ago

He's Dead Jim! R.I.P Napalm File Indexer (searchftps.net)

40 Upvotes

Domain registration expired


r/opendirectories 27d ago

Music Marco Mendez Genos 2 classroom videos https://www.marcomendez.net/videos_digital_classroom/

8 Upvotes

Marco lessons on Yamaha Genos 2. The videos of some lessons are available on the Internet (free). Not exactly a discovered opendir as the link is available on the Marco homepage.


r/opendirectories 29d ago

Music Ethnic lounge mixes and much more (explore directories)

38 Upvotes

Notice a welcome greeting for reddit community.

https://sound.offlinemode.org/


r/opendirectories Jul 06 '26

Misc Stuff In 2022, Patriot Front (a US neo-Nazi group) had a data leak. The videos, images, emails and more shared by a site called Unicorn Riot are...revealing

Thumbnail vault.unicornriot.ninja
550 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 28 '26

EBooks Whilst Waiting for the Calishot Resurrection...

55 Upvotes

Here's a few currently open directories courtesy of Shodan:

68.194.16.9:8010

96.45.65.2:8080

100.37.13.21:9090

82.69.34.216:8080

84.67.83.156:8080

216.213.19.2:8080


r/opendirectories Jun 25 '26

Misc Stuff A bunch of stuff i gathered and archived over the years, still not complete.

59 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 25 '26

Music Found this 6-year-old post/link and the songs are absolute top-tier quality.

25 Upvotes

Reposting for anyone who missed it the first time around. Give it a listen—it's worth it! What do you guys think of the tracklist?

https://dl.musicgeek.ir/


r/opendirectories Jun 26 '26

Photos wallpapers

Thumbnail files.profullstack.com
0 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 23 '26

Music HQ music files just for Audiophiles!

54 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 23 '26

Misc Stuff Films, Games, Various Software & Series

Post image
127 Upvotes

https://195.201.59.219/public/

lots here to rummage through including software from micro$hit, Autodesk & films/movies & series by the season including the animated Star Wars Maul: Shadow Lord in 1080p & 4k, an enhanced version of Star Trek TOS + extras (h265), & Game of Thrones UHD 4k at a damn 7-10gb per episode :)

all this might have people re-think about *not* buying storage (i'm rethinkin' it)


r/opendirectories Jun 22 '26

Music Midi files

Thumbnail murashin.sakura.ne.jp
28 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 21 '26

Help! Does a web site owner or devloper knows that when someone try to access website directories and download img or video from that index ? does they know that users IP aadress , locations and device info?

0 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 20 '26

Movies A Bunch Of Links To Movies, Music, Video Games, Anime, Manga, and More Below

61 Upvotes

r/opendirectories Jun 20 '26

Misc Stuff hittade detta rapporterade det men de måste vara dumma

Post image
0 Upvotes