How to setup and use rtorrent on Linux

Rotternt is relatively new but very popular bit torrent. rtorrent is text based ncurses bit torrent. Currently it works only on Linux. It is very easy to install rtorrent on centos machine using yum command.

Please follow the steps below to install rtorrent on centos. Open the bash and type the following command to install rtorrent

sudo yum -y install rtorrent

Lets check if it is already installed or not. Just do yum list rtorrent. If you see below output, it means it successfully installed.

[root@ns510700 phunt]# yum list rtorrent
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
 * epel: mirror.dst.ca
Installed Packages
rtorrent.x86_64                              0.9.6-2.el7                              @epel

Do help to find more information about the options, you can use on the command line.

rtorrent -h

This command will output the list of available commands for rtorrent.

rottent is under active development. Check out if you have the latest version installed. Latest information is available on github https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent. At the time of this post, Following is the list of stable versions released.

Latest

• http://rtorrent.net/downloads/libtorrent-0.13.8.tar.gz
• http://rtorrent.net/downloads/rtorrent-0.9.8.tar.gz

If for some reason you are not able to install using yum. Use can download the above tar.gz from git and install it.

How To Use Rtorrent

To start downloading torrents type the following command on your bash. In this example we are going to use a magnet link to download a torrent. Magnet links don't require a tracker nor does it require you to download a separate file before starting the download, which is convenient. Remember in below you need to replace magnet_link with the actual URL.

rtorrent 'magnet_link'

If you run in to below error.

( 0:48:31) Could not read resource file: ~/.rtorrent.rc

It means we need to locate rtorrent.rc file and copy to our home area. Lets see where it is? Do following..

find / | egrep 'rtorrent.rc'
/usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.9.6/rtorrent.rc

Lets copy the above file to ~/.rtorrent.rc

cp -p /usr/share/doc/rtorrent-0.9.6/rtorrent.rc ~/.rtorrent.rc

Now try download command again.

rtorrent 'magnet_link'

This command will start downloading the torrent file on your machine. Once you are done downloading the torrent to quit please type CTRL+Q on your machine.