How to setup rtorrent, rutorrent on Ubuntu

Posted on January 4, 2015 • 3 minutes • 556 words

This is a simple and concise tutorial on how to setup a seedbox running rtorrent with rutorrent as webui on Ubuntu OS. I’ve tried to simplify as much as possible to make it easy to understand. It may look a bit lengthy but it’s copy-paste-fu mostly.

Initial server setup

Login to your server and create a new user account, add it to sudo group. Substitute USER_NAME with your desired username.

ssh root@YOUR_SERVER_IP_ADDRESS
adduser USER_NAME
gpasswd -a USER_NAME sudo

Setup key authentication

It’s better, less hassle and a lot safer. You should use it.

# at your local machine: gen key and upload it to your vps
ssh-keygen -t rsa
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh USER_NAME@YOUR_SERVER_IP_ADDRESS 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

You can try logging in your server with the new user. It will not ask you to enter password this time.

Use nano to change PermitRootLogin to no. Ctrl+O to save and Ctrl+X to quit afterward.

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
service ssh restart

Setup rtorrent

# install libraries required to build rtorrent
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install subversion build-essential automake libtool libcppunit-dev libcurl3-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev unzip unrar-free curl libncurses-dev libxml2-dev

# download source and install
cd ~
mkdir src
cd src
svn checkout http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xmlrpc-c/stable xmlrpc
cd xmlrpc
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-libxml2-backend --disable-libwww-client --disable-wininet-client --disable-abyss-server --disable-cgi-server --disable-cplusplus
make
make install

Install libtorrent

cd ~
wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/libtorrent-0.13.4.tar.gz
tar xvf libtorrent-0.13.4.tar.gz
cd libtorrent-0.13.4
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Install rtorrent

cd ~ # back to home
wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/rtorrent-0.9.4.tar.gz
tar xvf rtorrent-0.9.4.tar.gz
cd rtorrent-0.9.4
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-xmlrpc-c
make
make install
ldconfig

Create new user to run rtorrent and required folders

useradd -d /home/rtorrent_usr/ rtorrent_usr
mkdir /home/rtorrent_usr
mkdir /home/rtorrent_usr/downloads
mkdir /home/rtorrent_usr/.session
mkdir /home/rtorrent_usr/watch
mkdir /home/rtorrent_usr/.sockets
touch /home/rtorrent_usr/.sockets/rpc-socket
nano /home/rtorrent_usr/.rtorrent.rc
# update permission
chown -R rtorrent_usr:rtorrent_usr /home/rtorrent_usr/
chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/nginx/html

For rtorrent config, you can copy the default one and mess around. It’s simple and straight forward. I won’t go into details here.

cp /usr/share/doc/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc ~/.rtorrent.rc

Setup nginx/rutorrent for webui

Install nginx and php5-fpm to run rutorrent

sudo apt-get install nginx php5-fpm php5-cli

By default, your root folder will be at usr/share/nginx/html.

Create a configuration file for rutorrent

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/rutorrent

Copy and paste the content below

server {
  listen   80;
  listen   [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6

  root /usr/share/nginx/html;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;

  server_name localhost;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
  }

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
  location = /50x.html {
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
  }

  # php5-fpm
  location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    # With php5-fpm:
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Create symlink to sites-enabled and restart nginx

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/rutorrent
# restart nginx
service nginx restart

Create a test file to verify php5-fpm is working

nano /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php
# use content below 
<?php
  phpinfo();
?>

Download rutorrent

cd /usr/share/nginx/html
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rutorrent
svn checkout http://rutorrent.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins
rm -r rutorrent/plugins
mv plugins rutorrent/

And that’s it. Start rtorrent and things should work as it supposes to. Feel free to ask me any question if you got stuck.

If you’re a casual torrent user like me and still looking for a dead-cheap, torrent-friendly VPS provider, I may recommend you to take a look at RamNode . They provide a $15 per YEAR for 80GB of space and 500GB bandwidth. As long as you don’t do heavy torrenting and public trackers, you should be safe.

Cheers!