Installation Guide

This chapter has some pointers to common ways of installing rTorrent on your machine – and in many cases, also ruTorrent and other related apps and services. It does not provide yet another way to do that, because there already are plentiful and redundant sources out there.

Installation Using OS Packages

While installing using pre-compiled packages is the easiest way to get a working rTorrent executable onto your system, it has the unfortunate side-effect that quite often these packages contain a rather outdated version of it.

You might want to look in the “testing” or “experimental” repositories of your distribution, or alternatively install from source (see below).

  • The rTorrent wiki lists package names and installation commands for a lot of Linux distributions and other operating systems.

  • DEB packages of rTorrent-PS for Debian and Ubuntu are on GitHub.

  • “Arch User Repository” (AUR) PKGBUILDs maintained by @xsmile for libtorrent-ps and rtorrent-ps. See also the Arch Linux wiki page.

Automated Installation

This is just a selection of the myriad of projects out there that perform automated installs. If you miss something, please make sure a potential new entry is actually still maintained, and mention what target platforms it is designed and tested for.

Projects that work on Debian very likely also work on Ubuntu. Just make sure the release dates match reasonably, i.e. Jessie is equivalent to either Xenial or Trusty. If you want to run ruTorrent, the default version of PHP is very important (either 5 or 7).

pimp-my-box

Ansible · Ubuntu Xenial + Trusty · Debian Jessie + Wheezy · Raspian

This will install rTorrent-PS, pyrocore, and related software onto any remote dedicated server or VPS with root access, running Debian or a Debian-like OS. It does so via Ansible, which is in many ways superior to the usual “call a bash script to set up things once and never be able to update them again”, since you can run this setup repeatedly to either fix problems, or to install upgrades and new features added to the project’s repository.

QuickBox and Swizzin

bash + Javascript

QuickBox provides easy seedbox and services management from a web dashboard. With the click of a button users can install additional application packages.

Swizzin is a fork and strives to be more light-weight and modular.

AtoMiC-ToolKit

bash · Ubuntu/Mint · full HTPC setup

AtoMiC Toolkit simplifies the setup of a HTPC or home server and its management, on Ubuntu and Debian variants including Raspbian. It currently supports:

  • CouchPotato

  • Emby

  • Headphones

  • HTPC Manager

  • Lazy Librarian

  • Mylar

  • Nzbget

  • NZBHydra

  • Plex

  • PlexPy

  • PyLoad

  • qBittorrent

  • Radarr

  • Sabnzbdplus

  • Sickgear

  • Sickrage

  • Sonarr

  • TransmissionBT

  • Webmin

rtinst

bash · Trusty · Wheezy / Jessie

Seedbox installation script for Ubuntu and Debian systems.

Kerwood

bash · Debian Jessie + Wheezy · Raspian

Auto install script for rTorrent, with ruTorrent as the web client.

Installing from Source

If you compile your own executable, you are free to chose whatever version you want, including the current bleeding edge of development (git HEAD), or any “release tarball”.

Installing (rTorrent wiki)

Installation information and some trouble-shooting hints in the rTorrent wiki.

Manual Turn-Key System Setup (PyroScope)

Installation instructions for a working rTorrent instance in combination with PyroScope from scratch, on Debian and most Debian-derived distros, but also Fedora 26 and others with a little variation.

Installing the “Ultimate Torrent Setup”

Guide to install rtorrent, ruTorrent, Sonarr, and CouchPotato on Ubuntu, proxied by Apache httpd.

Installation Guide (JES.SC)

A single-page, comprehensive guide to take you step-by-step through installation and configuration of rTorrent and ruTorrent.

Installation How-To (LinOxide)

How to install / setup rTorrent and ruTorrent on CentOS or Ubuntu.

Using rtorrent on Linux like a pro

An oldie (originally from 2010), but still good.

rTorrent Distributions

rTorrent-PS

A rTorrent distribution (not a fork of it), in form of a set of patches that improve the user experience and stability of official rTorrent releases. The notable additions are the more condensed ncurses UI with colorization and a network bandwidth graph, and a default configuration providing many new features, based in part on an extended command set.

rTorrent-PS-CH

This puts more patches and a different default configuration on top of rTorrent-PS. It also tries to work with the current git HEAD of rTorrent, which rTorrent-PS does not.