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Showing posts with label bittorrent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bittorrent. Show all posts

Saturday, April 21, 2012

starting rtorrent on system startup

rTorrent is a curses-based bittorrent client for Linux.

It's very light on system resources but has great features such as monitoring of a directory for .torrent files, auto-move based on status (incoming, seeding, complete, etc), categories, magnet link handling and RSS capabilities.

I have a headless system where I seed some (legal) torrents and wanted rTorrent to start up when the system did. There are some examples of init scripts on the rTorrent site but I didn't like how these ran, specifically the su constantly needing a password and the odd way it started GNU Screen.

Download
Installation
  • Put it at /etc/init.d/bittorrent and make it executable
    chmod +x /etc/init.d/bittorrent
  • Add to chkconfig
    chkconfig --add bittorrent
  • Set to start on system startup
    chkconfig bittorrent on
  • If you want non-root users to be able to control it, put this in your visudo, replace "username" with your non-priveledged username
    username localhost=NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/bittorrent*
  • Setup an alias to the script in the user's ~/.bashrc
    alias bittorrent='/etc/init.d/bittorrent'
    alias bt='bittorrent'
Requirements
  • CentOS 6 or Fedora 12-14. Probably also works on CentOS 5.
  • screen and rtorrent
  • A non-priveledged user to run rtorrent, this can either be a new user just to run torrents, or an existing user
  • Absolute session path in the .rtorrent.rc file
    session = /home/rtorrent/.session  ## this is good
    session = ~/.session               ## this will break
    session = .session                 ## so will this
  • Paths for other actions such as monitoring directories for .torrent files and auto-moving complete downloads don't have to be absolute.
Usage
  • Control the daemon withbittorrent start, bittorent stop, bittorrent restart
  • Get information about the daemon with
    bittorrent status, bittorrent info
  • Connect to the screen session with
    bittorrent connect
    (press ctrl+a then d to disconnect)
Licensing