ruTorrent is a popular web interface for the rtorrent client, here’s how to set it up with lighttpd on Debian.

Incus#

In this example, we will set up ruTorrent and rtorrent in an incus container. If you just want to set it up on a regular Debian server, just skip the Incus specific parts, and make sure you don’t run any application as root.

Start by launching a container:

incus launch images:debian/bookworm torrent

If you want a shared mount for this container, add it with incus config edit:

share:
  path: /share
  readonly: 'false'
  source: /mnt/share/
  type: disk

For “consumer” containers, you may want readonly: "true".

“Container root” is uid 1000000, so any disk shared like this needs to have its permissions changed to allow write access. In this case, we’ll go with an ownership change from root:root to 1000000:root recursively, but you should pick something suitable for your setup:

chown -Rv 1000000:root /mnt/share

Now, let’s move into the container with exec bash.

Installation steps# 

apt install rtorrent lighttpd php-fpm php-cli php-curl php-xmlrpc git curl

In /var/www we’re going to clone the ruTorrent web UI repo, choose a tagged release of your preference:

git clone --branch v5.2.10 --depth 1 https://github.com/Novik/ruTorrent.git

We need to fix permissions so that lighttpd can access these files:

chown -Rv root:www-data /var/www/ruTorrent/
chmod -Rv 770 /var/www/ruTorrent/

Let’s create our first systemd service:

rtorrent#

Create /etc/systemd/system/rtorrent.service:

[Unit]
Description=rTorrent BitTorrent Client
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rtorrent -n -o import=/root/.rtorrent.rc
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

All configuration is done in /root/.rtorrent.rc:

# see https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent/wiki/Performance-Tuning

# 90-ish percent of total bandwidth to avoid latency spikes
throttle.global_down.max_rate.set_kb = 52000
throttle.global_up.max_rate.set_kb   = 10000

pieces.memory.max.set = 2048M
network.max_open_sockets.set = 1024
network.max_open_files.set = 1024

directory.default.set = /root/rtorrent/data
session.path.set = /root/rtorrent/session
network.scgi.open_local = /run/rtorrent.sock
execute.nothrow = chown,root:www-data,/run/rtorrent.sock
execute.nothrow = chmod,770,/run/rtorrent.sock

# make sure port 50000 below can be reached
network.port_range.set = 50000-50000
network.port_random.set = no

dht.mode.set = auto
protocol.pex.set = yes
system.umask.set = 0007
system.daemon.set = true

Create the folders we just referred to:

mkdir -p /root/rtorrent/session
mkdir /root/rtorrent/data

Enable and start rtorrent:

systemctl enable rtorrent --now

ruTorrent#

ruTorrent comes with a bunch of plugins, some of which require external dependencies that may not be available. If you don’t want these plugins, simply remove them:

cd /var/www/ruTorrent/plugins

rm -rfv _cloudflare rss rssurlrewrite rutracker_check spectrogram mediainfo screenshots dump unpack

The only config change that needs to be done in regards to ruTorrent is to point it to the correct socket, i.e. the one we specified in the rtorrent configuration. In conf/config.php set:

$scgi_port = 0;
$scgi_host = "unix:///run/rtorrent.sock";

Optionally, you may also want to change /var/www/ruTorrent/plugins/theme/conf.php and set:

$defaultTheme = "MaterialDesign";

lighttpd#

There’s a few things we need to do to make lighttpd serve this PHP code correctly – it has the concept of “modules” which are what you may recognize from something like nginx etc as the available and enabled directories. Let’s start by disabling the “unconfigured” module that is enabled by default:

lighty-disable-mod unconfigured

Now, create /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/90-rutorrent.conf:

server.modules += ( "mod_scgi" )
server.document-root = "/var/www/ruTorrent"
scgi.server = (
  "/RPC2" => (
    "/" => (
      "socket" => "/run/rtorrent.sock",
      "check-local" => "disable"
    )
  )
)

We can now enable this as well as the required php module at the same time:

lighty-enable-mod rutorrent fastcgi-php-fpm

To avoid a crash, we must also in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf comment out the server.document-root value, since we changed it above.

You can now:

systemctl restart lighttpd

Reverse proxy#

lighttpd is configured to serve normal http on port 80, because the expectation here is that a reverse proxy is used for TLS termination. Configure one of your choice to forward traffic to the container.

Networking#

We previously configured rtorrent to use port 50000, if that’s open then everything is fine. If not, and this is an incus container, we need to add a port forward. First:

  • create a forward list on the bridge for the host ip, if not done already
incus network forward list incusbr0
incus network forward create incusbr0 192.168.1.10

Where 192.168.1.10 is the ip of your host system on its network.

  • edit the forward list and add a descriptive entry in “ports” to the container ip

incus network forward edit incusbr0 192.168.1.10

- description: rtorrent_tcp
  protocol: tcp
  listen_port: '50000'
  target_port: '50000'
  target_address: 10.191.32.229
- description: rtorrent_udp
  protocol: udp
  listen_port: '50000'
  target_port: '50000'
  target_address: 10.191.32.229

Where 10.191.32.229 is the ip of your container. Now, as long as traffic hits 192.168.1.10:5000, it should be forwarded correctly.

Thoughts and feedback are welcome via @[email protected] – email works too.