When it comes to downloading torrents and magnets, I normally stick to qBittorrent on my laptop. It is easy to use, fast, smooth and light. But when you are connected to a remote machine through a terminal the situation changes abruptly. You don’t have any X support (but maybe your server is connected to the internet over a 1GBPS line waiting to be utilized). You get your hands dirty with rTorrent. Written in C++, exceptionally light, incredibly fast and running on a thin library, rTorrent is bound to amaze you once you get hold of the basic usage. It has all the essential functionality of a powerful torrent (and magnet) client.
To install rTorrent on Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install rtorrent
rtorrent is highly configurable. You’ll find some useful links explaining all the configuration options towards the end of this article. For a quick start, here’s a sample configuration file. Note that you need to create the download directory (first line) and the ~/.session directory.
directory = /home/user/Downloads/torrents/ min_peers = 10 max_peers = 20 min_peers_seed = 1 max_peers_seed = 1 max_uploads = 1 max_uploads_global = 1 max_downloads_global = 3 download_rate = 0 upload_rate = 1 session=~/.session dht = auto dht_port = 6881 peer_exchange = true
Some useful tips for navigation: while searching for a file, <Tab>
completes the directories. And you can open a torrent file directly using
$ rtorrent mytorrent.torrent OR URL //note: URL works for torrent only
You can close the terminal and keep rTorrent running in the background. Run:
$ dtach -A /tmp/rtorsocket -z rtorrent
To resume, run:
$ dtach -a /tmp/mytorrent.torrent
Remember not to close the terminal with <Ctrl-d>
. Either close it by clicking the close button or use <Ctrl-\>
. More methods to detach console processes and keep them running in the background here.
rTorrent can also download torrents if you provide the direct URL to rTorrent as a parameter while starting it.
Here are some articles explaining navigation, configuration etc. at a very granular level:
- rTorrent (on ArchWiki)
- man rtorrent
Webpage: rTorrent
use screen sessions to run things on servers. even if your connection goes down, your process keeps running on server.
Thanks! screen is also explained in the last link.