Which torrent apps work headless (from command line only)?

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There's a question on here about what torrent apps work well remotely, but I'm hoping to find out one that works well through a command line interface, preferably with no GUI.

What torrent apps would you recommend for running from the command line?

jweede

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 6 325

Answers

7

You should look at deluge. It is cross-platform, and is excellent as a headless app.

Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux, OS X, Unix and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it's backend and features multiple user-interfaces including: GTK+, web and console. It has been designed using the client server model with a daemon process that handles all the bittorrent activity. The Deluge daemon is able to run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely from any platform.

Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge's functionality is available in the form of plugins.

Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. It is our belief that downloading shouldn't be the primary task on your computer and therefore shouldn't monopolize system resources.

Deluge is not designed for any one desktop environment and will work just fine in GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. We do our best to adhere to the freedesktop standards.

I have the deluged daemon run as a service on boot, and also run a client on the same machine that hosts the web interface. I then use the web interface from all my systems.

user4358

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation:

If your application is fully non-interactive, deluged's interface is nicer. rtorrent is fully ncurses, i.e. interactive. – bukzor – 2014-07-03T00:53:39.113

As much as I loved deluge when I started, it had some serious problems with the libtorrent library not working with socks5 proxies, and at the time there was no fix, which caused me to move on.

Apparently they've fixed the problem, but I'm not sure if that's made it into the repositories yet, so you may still have to build from source. – Kirkland – 2014-07-25T16:08:14.210

I prefer rtorrent, but only because I'm very stingy with my memory and tend to get better performance out of it. – Rob – 2012-04-10T22:10:57.183

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You should take a look at this wikipedia entry. I've used rtorrent and i liked it.

Tutul

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 478

Is rTorrent available for Windows? (or are there any ports) – Breakthrough – 2009-09-04T18:50:29.533

no, i suggested as you tagged it linux, for windows you can use webUI of uTorrent – Tutul – 2009-09-04T18:54:25.390

5

For Unix-based systems you can use rTorrent.

Albic

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 2 170

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I use the original BitTorrent client, btlaunchmanycurses and btdownloadcurses work fine, specially combined with screen (to allow for unattended downloading).

There is a more detailed description (in French) on my blog.

bortzmeyer

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 1 083

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I use rtorrent most of the time, running in a screen, but for the occasional one-off download I also like to use aria2, which I otherwise usually use for managed HTTP downloads.

aria2 also supports magnet: links, which I think I have heard that rtorrent is supposed to do in some version, but doesn't in the old Debian I use. Finally, in aria2's favor (in your case) is that it has less UI than rtorrent.

clacke

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 218

0

It appears that you have many options. According to this page and my knowledge, you can use any of these:

  • qbittorrent-nox
  • Deluge
  • aria2
  • Transmission (daemon)
  • rtorrent

NoOne

Posted 2009-09-04T18:45:38.607

Reputation: 263