Getting rtorrent to run in a server-client configuration

[mrjpaxton]

Hey, I was wondering if I can get rtorrent to work in a client and server configuration specifically on Debian without installing too many extra packages.

Please note that Debian does not package rtorrentd separately, but I'm aware of it. I'd have to compile it from source.

So I have a custom NAS, and unfortunately it's running Armbian because I have to run it on there, but it's close enough to Debian! Anyways, I wanted to try to run it in daemon mode by specifying system.daemon.set = true, and although there's not a lot of documentation about how to use it, I wanted to try it out at least. If this doesn't help with anything, I'll just leave it disabled.

I also tried setting up a unit file for rtorrent with systemd here - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/RTorrent#Systemd_service_for_a_headless_server

But it doesn't work right. Just gives me errors like, "rtorrent.service: Failed to determine user credentials: No such process", and " rtorrent.service: Failed at step USER spawning /bin/rm: No such process", and "rtorrent.service: Failed at step USER spawning /usr/bin/rtorrent: No such process". Not sure what all of that means in terms of the actual problem exactly. But regardless, it's not working right now.

There's also a bind option. Now I'm not sure what this does exactly, and I'm not a big networking person, but I was hoping that somehow I could achieve what I want using this.

So does bind have to be used "server-side", so that it binds to localhost, and then I can use the ip option for whatever socket thing rtorrent uses (if it uses a socket), or does bind have to be used "client-side" to connect to rtorrent running on my NAS?

I am also aware of containers and Docker stuff, while I'm not completely opposed to trying it out, I would prefer something more lightweight or linux DIY personally, without it being a completely insecure hack, because I just want it to work reliably, and I'm getting tired of having to run rtorrent individually as a standalone Torrent client on all of my machines, I figured it would be nice to have it more centralized.

[beadon]

There are many ways to run rtorrent as a daemon.

Once of these ways is to wrap it in the utility, "screen", and create a systemd compatible file

file: /etc/systemd/system
user created: rtorrent
group created: fileadmin

• user is a part of this group
• target filesystem has multiple users allowing read / write access

[Unit]
Description=rTorrent
After=network.target

[Service]
User=rtorrent
Type=forking
KillMode=none
ExecStart=/usr/bin/screen -d -m -fa -S rtorrent /usr/bin/rtorrent
ExecStop=/usr/bin/killall -w -s 2 /usr/bin/rtorrent
WorkingDirectory=/home/rtorrent

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target