This how-to will guide you though the compilation of qBittorrent and libtorrent-rasterbar.

This guide is written for CentOS 7.x, but the process should be similar for other RHEL distributions.

Required dependencies

General required dependencies

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo yum install devtoolset-8-gcc devtoolset-8-gcc-c++
sudo yum install qt-devel openssl-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-linguist

Boost

Download latest version of Boost. (Actually 1.72.0)

wget https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/release/1.72.0/source/boost_1_72_0.tar.gz

Qt libraries

qBittorrent 4.0 - 4.1.x requires at least Qt 5.5.1, and qBittorrent 4.2 and later requires at least Qt 5.9.

Check installed version:

$ rpm -qa | grep qt5-qtbase
qt5-qtbase-common-5.9.7-2.el7.noarch
qt5-qtbase-gui-5.9.7-2.el7.x86_64
qt5-qtbase-5.9.7-2.el7.x86_64
qt5-qtbase-devel-5.9.7-2.el7.x86_64

Libtorrent

Libtorrent is a library written by Arvid Norberg that qBittorrent depends on. It is necessary to compile and install libtorrent before compiling qBittorrent.

Boost

Change devtoolsset if you didn't do that already: scl enable devtoolset-8 bash

Compile:

export DIR_BOOST="/opt/boost"
tar -xvf boost_1_72_0.tar.gz
cd boost_1_72_0
./bootstrap.sh --prefix=${DIR_BOOST}
./b2 install --prefix=${DIR_BOOST} --with=all -j$(( $(nproc) - 1 ))

Libtorrent

Change devtoolsset if you didn't do that already: scl enable devtoolset-8 bash

Clone from the repository: git clone --depth 1 -b RC_1_2 https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent.git

If you need to build deluge,you must run the following command:

yum -y install python-devel boost-devel

Compile:

cd libtorrent
./autotool.sh

# Only compiled for qbittorrent:
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-debug --enable-encryption --with-boost=${DIR_BOOST} CXXFLAGS=--std=c++14

# Compiling for both qbittorrent and deluge:
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-debug --enable-encryption --with-boost=${DIR_BOOST} CXXFLAGS=--std=c++14 --with-libiconv --with-libgeoip=system --enable-python-binding
make -j$(( $(nproc) - 1 ))
make install
ln -s /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libtorrent-rasterbar.pc /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/libtorrent-rasterbar.pc

Last command was missing and on 64bit systems will fail without it.Here is the error information:

checking for libtorrent... no
configure: error: Package requirements (libtorrent-rasterbar >= 1.0.6) were not met:

No package 'libtorrent-rasterbar' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables libtorrent_CFLAGS
and libtorrent_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

Compiling qBittorrent (without the GUI)

First, obtain the qBittorrent source code.

Either download and extract a .tar archive from the GitHub releases page or clone the git repository: git clone --depth 1 -b v4_2_x https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent

Change devtoolsset if you didn't do that already: scl enable devtoolset-8 bash

Compile:

cd qBittorrent
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-gui CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/qt5 --with-boost=${DIR_BOOST} CXXFLAGS=--std=c++14
make -j$(( $(nproc) - 1 ))
make install

Since you disabled the graphical user interface, qBittorrent can only be controlled via its WebUI. By default, you can access it at http://localhost:8080 with the default credentials:

Username: admin
Password: adminadmin

Documentation about running qBittorrent without GUI is available here.

To set up qbittorrent as a deamon see this guide

Troubleshooting

If are you facing a problem like this:

qbittorrent-nox: error while loading shared libraries: libtorrent-rasterbar.so 10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This often happened when you are using 64-bit CentOS 7.x. And it's because of the libraries that the qBittorrent need are not in /usr/lib64/.

You can simply create a soft link to solve it. Do it like this:

ln -s /usr/lib/libtorrent-rasterbar.so.10 /usr/lib64/libtorrent-rasterbar.so.10

For missing libboost_system.so.1.72.0:

ln -s /opt/boost/lib/libboost_system.so.1.72.0 /usr/lib64/libboost_system.so.1.72.0