rtorrent install

Introduction

Since version 0.7.8 of rtorrent, most distros have compiled rtorrent with xmlrpc-c. If you are using a relatively current distro (e.g. Ubuntu 10.04LTS or newer) installation is as simple as using your package manager.

sudo apt-get install rtorrent

Once installed you can proceed to configure rtorrent

Dependencies:

• gcc
• ncurses
• libsigc++-2.0
• libssl
• xmlrpc-c

Installing xmlrpc-c

It's recommended that you use a newer version of xmlrpc-c.

For example, the svn version.

svn co http://svn.code.sf.net/p/xmlrpc-c/code/advanced xmlrpc-c
cd xmlrpc-c
./configure
make
make install

This installed xmlrpc-c-config to /usr/local/bin/xmlrpc-c-config

fetch and install rtorrent

Now, provided you have the other dependencies for rtorrent installed, you can install libtorrent and rtorrent as follows:

wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/libtorrent-0.13.4.tar.gz
wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/rtorrent-0.9.4.tar.gz
tar xzfv libtorrent-0.13.4.tar.gz
tar xzfv rtorrent-0.9.4.tar.gz
cd libtorrent-0.13.4
./configure
make
make install
cd ../rtorrent-0.9.4/
./configure --with-xmlrpc-c=/usr/local/bin/xmlrpc-c-config
make
make install

On a FreeBSD system with Ports installed, all of the above can be done with a single line of code:

cd /usr/ports/net-p2p/rtorrent/ && make install clean

rtorrent Setup and Configuration

rtorrent can be run as any user (or multiple users). Generally, it's a bad idea to run rtorrent as the root user, so create a unique user, and make sure to add a .rtorrent.rc. Make sure to enable scgi port with something like this:

scgi_port = 127.0.0.1:5001