RTorrent BitTorrent Client

rTorrent is a stable, high-performance and low resource consumption BitTorrent client.

This distribution focuses on additional user-facing features, optimizations and better integrations with modern users of RPC interfaces. One of the long-term goal of this project is to switch from antique XML-RPC to modern protocols with bidirectional capabilities such as gRPC, JSON-RPC over WebSocket or GraphQL, which allows real-time events, less serialization/transfer overheads, better security, etc.

There is NO CHANGE in consensus-layer (BitTorrent protocol). As such, this distribution will behave exactly the same as vanilla rTorrent in the swarm, and there will not be any compatibility issue with certain trackers, if rTorrent 0.9.8 is supported.

Getting started

Installation

Fully static binaries are available at Releases.

# Install rTorrent to /usr/local/bin/rtorrent
# rtorrent-linux-amd64 and rtorrent-linux-arm64 are available
sudo wget https://github.com/jesec/rtorrent/releases/latest/download/rtorrent-linux-amd64 -O /usr/local/bin/rtorrent

# Make it executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rtorrent

# Default configuration
sudo mkdir -p /etc/rtorrent
sudo wget https://github.com/jesec/rtorrent/releases/latest/download/rtorrent.rc -O /etc/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc

# Install as a systemd service (optional)
# This example uses "download" user. Replace it with the an existing user that rTorrent should run with.
sudo wget https://github.com/jesec/rtorrent/releases/latest/download/rtorrent@.service -O /etc/systemd/system/rtorrent@.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable rtorrent@download
sudo systemctl start rtorrent@download

Or install with APT repository

Or run with Docker

Or build from source

Use

Run rtorrent

You can execute rTorrent commands to set port, set announced IP, etc.

For example, to launch rTorrent with port 6881 and DHT disabled, rtorrent -o network.port_range.set=6881-6881,dht.mode.set=disable.

Checkout Flood, a modern Web UI for rTorrent.

To learn how to use rTorrent visit the Wiki.

Configuration

Default configuration file is available at doc/rtorrent.rc. It is often installed to /etc/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc.

You may modify the configuration file to fit your needs. Alternatively, use -o, as documented above, to override some configurations but keep using the loaded configuration file.

It is recommended to expand upon the default configuration if user-specific config files (usually placed to $HOME/.rtorrent.rc) are used:

## Import default configurations
import = /etc/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc

## Your configurations
...

rTorrent tries to load a configuration file from several locations:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc (highest priority)
• $HOME/.config/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc
• $HOME/.rtorrent.rc
• /etc/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc (lowest priority)

Or, use -n argument to prevent rTorrent from loading any configuration file. Then you can use -o try_import=<path> to load a config file from an arbitrary location.

Build

Bazel

Bazel 3 or later is required.

Bazel manages most dependencies.

Dependencies are specified by the WORKSPACE file. Sometimes you may want to override a specific dependency with a local repository for easier development. To do that, use override_repository Bazel command line argument. For example, --override_repository=libtorrent=/path/to/local/libtorrent.

Unmanaged dependencies:

• GCC/Clang compiler toolchain and C/C++ development files (C++17 support required)

# Install Bazel
# Use the build of your system and architecture
# bazelisk-linux-arm64 and bazelisk-darwin-amd64 are also available
sudo wget https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/releases/latest/download/bazelisk-linux-amd64 -O /usr/local/bin/bazel
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/bazel

# Install unmanaged dependencies and build tools
# Use the package manager of your distribution
sudo apt install build-essential

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/jesec/rtorrent.git
cd rtorrent

# Build
# By default, the executable is self contained, yet it depends on C/C++ standard libraries of system.
# To generate a fully static executable, use --features=fully_static_link argument.
# Note that glibc have issues that make static executables unreliable.
# If you want fully static, reproducible, portable and stable executable, build with Dockerfile.
bazel build rtorrent

# Binary available at bazel-bin/rtorrent

CMake

CMake 3.5 or later is required.

You have to install dependencies manually to system or let CMake know where to find them.

Dependencies:

• GCC/Clang compiler toolchain and C/C++ development files (C++17 support required)
• libtorrent with development files (core dependency, matching version required)
• libcurl with development files
• libncurses/libncursesw with development files (for terminal UI)
• libxmlrpc-c with development files (optional if USE_XMLRPC=OFF, for XML-RPC support)
• nlohmann/json with development files (optional if USE_JSONRPC=OFF, for JSON-RPC support)
• googletest with development files (optional, for unit tests)

# Compile and install libtorrent (matching version required)
# Check README of libtorrent for instructions

# Install dependencies and build tools
# Use the package manager of your distribution
sudo apt install build-essential cmake libc6-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libncursesw5-dev libxmlrpc-c++8-dev libgtest-dev nlohmann-json3-dev

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/jesec/rtorrent.git
cd rtorrent

# Configure and generate Makefile
cmake .

# Build
# By default, shared binaries are generated
make

# Binary available at ./rtorrent

# Install (optional)
sudo make install

Docker

Dockerfile

To test: docker run -it jesec/rtorrent

Note that you have to expose BitTorrent port (e.g. -p 50000:50000) and map folders (e.g. -v /home/download:/home/download) yourself.

By default, rTorrent's files are located in $HOME/.local/share/rtorrent. Check doc/rtorrent.rc to know more about the default configurations.

To integrate with Flood, see discussions.

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