parallelpan/hongguo-downloader

What it is

Hongguo (红果短剧) offers no whole-series download inside its app; saving a complete drama means clicking through episodes one by one. This project presents a web service that takes a share link, share code, or series ID, resolves the title, cover, episode count and update status, then downloads, verifies, packages and issues links in the cloud. It is aimed at people who want to archive a full drama without installing a desktop client (7).

The repository itself is documentation: screenshots, architecture, payment and operations notes. It states that it does not ship content-acquisition code or tools (30). The live product is the actual way to use the service.

Quick start

1. Open the online site at guoshi.app and paste a Hongguo share link, share code, or episode number.
2. After parsing, review the series details and episode list, then select the episodes to fetch (8).
3. Processing runs server-side; each episode has an independent status and failed episodes can be retried.
4. When fetching, pay for the selected episodes and receive 24-hour direct links, either per episode or as a single ZIP package. Per the FAQ, repeat fetches do not charge again, and failed episodes are not billed (26)(28)(29).

The repository README does not provide a self-hosting setup, deployment commands, or source-installation steps. The API docs and health check are hosted on the same service.

Constraints

• The service is usage-billed per episode, with balance, card codes and online payment channels; it is not a free or membership-only downloader (27).
• Direct links are valid for 24 hours. Downloading again refreshes the link rather than charging a second time (19)(28).
• The repository is explicitly unofficial and unaffiliated with Hongguo or ByteDance. Users are responsible for ensuring they have the right to download the content and for complying with local law and platform terms (30).
• Documentation and screenshots are under CC BY-NC 4.0, which permits sharing with attribution but not commercial use (31).
• No executable code, model weights, or self-hosted deployment package is present in the repository, so the documented architecture cannot be reproduced from this repo alone.

HotRepo's take

The project appeared on HotRepo's new-project board on 2026-11-02, gaining 148 stars in roughly an hour and reaching 375 stars with 1 fork (1). Such a skew toward stars over forks is consistent with a documentation page that funnels readers to a hosted paid service rather than a codebase people fork and build on. The README's engineering notes on table-based queues, deferred billing and dual payment channels are detailed, but until the repository includes runnable code or a self-hosting path, those remain product documentation rather than a reproducible open-source tool.