• ruTorrent Plugin to create a webseed only torrent.

• Adds a right-click menu item to ruTorrent for downloading a webseed torrent.

Webseed Torrents

Useful for downloading a private torrent from a seedbox completely intact with out affecting download/seed ratios. The main reason for doing this is to facilitate downlading a completey intact folder stucture of the torrent and being able to use a local torrent client to do the last mile file transfer to you local machine, rather than using FTP or rSync.

A webseed-only torrent is stripped of all tracker information and includes only a http(s) "webseed". The local torrent client makes use of the web seed torrent by downloading files of the torrent, directly via http from your seedbox.

Caveats

You should be VERY careful about who you share your webseed.torrent files with. THEY SHOULD NEVER BE SHARED PUBLICLY - as they contain a direct link to your private seedbox, (AND depending on your configuration, may contain Authetication Credentials - HTTP Auth username and password.)

Webseed torrents can experience poor speeds in libtorrent based clients. Clients known to get good speeds are Deluge 2, Aria2, uGet with Aira2 backend, and also Free Download Manager for Windows.

Configuration requires ruTorrent's downloads folder to be served over http. e.g. accessable by URL like http://seedbox.example.com/downloads However, the URL path does not need to be indexable (list folder contents). See zvodd/webseeder project for a stand alone http(s) server that can fulfill this requirement (necessitates custom ports.)

Install

Copy this repo into your /srv/rutorrent/plugins folder named webseedsource. From /srv/rutorrent/plugins directory run:

git clone https://github.com/zvodd/rutorrent-webseed-download-plugin.git webseedsource

You should now have a /srv/rutorrent/plugins/webseedsource directory.

Configuration

Edit the variables in conf.php.

WebSeed URL

This is put inside the torrent file itself and is how your local torrent file finds actually accesses the payload data.

Set the $weebseedurl variable to point to the base URL of your web server's download location. e.g.

$webseedurl = "https://example.com/downloads";

Replace example.comwith your server's domain name or IP address. Also replace /downloads with the correct website path to your downloads. Prefix with http:// or https:// appropriate to your server config.

The URL must be a "live" http/https location with the path component mapped to ruTorrent's download folder. i.e. served with Apache or nginx.

HTTP Auth (Optional)

This is required if the web address to your downloads is behind HTTP Auth. If not; DO NOT include the username:password part in the line.

Note: Only non-Auth or Auth Basic HTTP URIs work (for torrent clients tested), Auth Basic URIs follow this format:

$webseedurl = "https://username:[email protected]/downloads";

Set local path of torrent folder.

Finally modify $webseedbase to point to the OS folder path of your served rtorrent downloads folder. For example if seedbox's url for serving https://example.com/downloads gets files from /home/user/rtorrent_downloads then the line should be:

$webseedbase = "/home/user/rtorrent_downloads";

Apache Config for HTTP Auth Digest configs.

Tested with QuickBox.io seedboxes

If you have ruTorrent fileshare plugin, you can create a symlink to your rutorrent downloads folder in the fileshare plugin's folder:

ln -s /home/user/rtorrent_downloads /srv/rutorrent/home/fileshare/webseed

Assuming it has an appropraite apache2 config entry that allows FollowSymLinks e.g. a file in /etc/apache2/site-enabled/*.conf similiar to this:

<Directory "/srv/rutorrent/home/fileshare">
    Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Satisfy Any
</Directory>

In this case $webseedurl in conf.php should be something like "http://example.com/fileshare/webseed"

Glossary of example variables

All instances of above examples directories and paths are common examples, that very likley wont match your seedbox setup excatly. An explanation for each follows:

The main download destination of rTorrrent / ruTorrent, used as the value for $webseedbase in conf.php

/home/user/rtorrent_downloads

The install directory of ruTorrent:

/srv/rutorrent

ruTorrent's plugins directory, it should be full of plugins.

/srv/rutorrent/plugins

The directory that ruTorrent-fileshare-plugin uses, contains share.php:

/srv/rutorrent/home/fileshare

URL using HTTP Auth Basic with Username and password in URL:

https://username:[email protected]/downloads