ruTorrent

ruTorrent is a front-end for the popular Bittorrent client rtorrent.

This project is released under the GPLv3 license, for more details, take a look at the LICENSE.md file in the source.

Main features

• Lightweight server side, so it can be installed on old and low-end servers and even on some SOHO routers
• Extensible - there are several plugins and everybody can create their own one
• Nice look ;)

Screenshots

Download

• Stable version — the latest tagged release
• Current master — what the next release is cut from

Getting started

• There's no installation routine or compilation necessary. The sources are cloned/unpacked into a directory which is setup as document root of a web server of your choice (for detailed instructions see the webserver wiki article).
• After setting up the webserver ruTorrent itself needs to be configured. Instructions can be found in various articles in the wiki.

Contributing

Pull requests target master. There is no develop branch — it was retired, and a release is simply a tag on master.

Using AI tooling to write a patch is fine. Opening what it produced without reading it is not. Whatever wrote the code, the pull request is yours, and that means three things before you open it:

1. Check that it is sane. Read the whole diff yourself. A PR that reformats files it had no reason to touch, or that contains changes you cannot explain in your own words, will be closed rather than reviewed.
2. Vouch for it. Run it on a real ruTorrent instance that you actually use — your own, with your torrents and plugins, left running long enough to see it behave. A container spun up to prove the diff applies is not a test. Say in the PR what you ran it against and what you saw.
3. Answer reviews personally. Review comments are addressed to you. If the replies are generated and unread, the PR stops there.

Keep the diff scoped to the change. Whitespace churn, unrelated reformatting and rewritten vendored files make a patch unreviewable, and a patch nobody can review does not get merged.

Requirements

• PHP 7.4 or newer, with the json and pcre extensions. The simplexml, curl, mbstring and zlib extensions are recommended — some plugins and the XMLRPC proxy need them — as are the php, curl and gzip command-line programs.
• rtorrent: the 0.9.8 baseline and the 0.16.x series are supported. Other versions may or may not work.
• A web server with ruTorrent's directory as its document root (see the webserver wiki article).

Checking your environment

A checker is bundled with ruTorrent. Run it from the command line, from inside your ruTorrent directory:

php env_check.php

It verifies the PHP version and extensions, the external programs plugins rely on, common conf/config.php mistakes, and connects to rtorrent to report and classify its version. It exits 0 when everything required passes and 1 otherwise, so it can be used in scripts. For safety it runs on the command line only and refuses to run under a web server.