BitTorrent

We'll start with the installation of a Transmission server, based on a Debian template.

> apt-get install transmission-daemon

This will start the transmission daemon process (service), it will be running under a new user created at install time: 'debian-transmission'. Note that, at the same time, a directory belonging to this same user was also created: '/var/lib/transmission-daemon'. It contains a 'downloads' folder and a symlink to the configuration directory.

We'll create a “seeding” directory and edit the configuration file, for this we need to stop the service first:

> mkdir /var/lib/transmission-daemon/seeding
> chown debian-transmission:debian-transmission /var/lib/transmission-daemon/seeding
> service transmission-daemon stop
> nano /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/settings.json

Refering to https://ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-server-seeding-dht-torrents, here are the important settings to set:

"download-dir": "/var/lib/transmission/seeding",
"incomplete-dir": "/var/lib/transmission/seeding",
"dht-enabled": true,
"pex-enabled": true,
"peer-limit-per-torrent": 10,
"port-forwarding-enabled": false,
"queue-stalled-enabled": false,
"speed-limit-down": 50,
"speed-limit-down-enabled": true,
"speed-limit-up": 50,
"speed-limit-up-enabled": true,
"upload-slots-per-torrent": 5,
"user-has-given-informed-consent": true,
"watch-dir": "/var/lib/transmission/seeding",
"watch-dir-enabled": true,

For a complete description of all options: https://web.archive.org/web/20160428165927/https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/EditConfigFiles

https://github.com/da2x/mitorrent

First we must follow this installation guide to setup an appropriate python environment, we also need to have 'git' installed, so we can clone the GitHub repo.

> apt-get install git-core
> su py3
> cd $HOME
> git clone https://github.com/da2x/mitorrent.git
> cd mitorrent
> mkvirtualenv mitorrent
> chmod +x mitorrent-runner.py

> su py3
> cd $HOME/mitorrent
> workon mitorrent
> ./mitorrent-runner.py path/to/original/file > path/to/torrent/file.torrent