Controlling rtorrent with XML-RPC

I’m a huge fan of rtorrent. It’s simple, lean and elegant. I have so far only used it as an interactive BitTorrent client inside screen/tmux or as a batch downloader with a watch directory.

There is more to rtorrent however. It supports XML-RPC which means you can control it programmatically. As I was in dire need of a client I can manipulate from a script, I spent some time today to setup rtorrent correctly and call it remotely.

First we’re going to need something like this line in our .rtorrent.rc file.

scgi_port = localhost:5005

You can also make rtorrent listen to a UNIX socket:

scgi_local = /tmp/rtorrent-listening-here.sock

After that, we need a web server to forward our requests to rtorrent, and responses back to us. The web server will be communicating with rtorrent through SCGI. I use nginx for this purpose. Here’s the relevant nginx config for this:

server {
    listen 8000;
    server_name localhost;
    root /rtorrent/;
    location ^~ /RPC2 {
        include scgi_params;
#        scgi_pass  unix:/tmp/rtorrent-listening-here.sock;
        scgi_pass   127.0.0.1:5005;
    }
}

After this, reload nginx config, make sure rtorrent is running, and you’re ready to go.

In order to test your setup, or contact rtorrent from a shell script, you can use the xmlrpc utility accompanied by the libxmlrpc library. You can get this in Ubuntu by running sudo apt-get install libxmlrpc-core-c3-dev. After that, run this:

xmlrpc localhost:8000 system.listMethods

If everything is done correctly, you will get a list of RPC methods supported by rtorrent.

Some useful commands:

Add a torrent file and start downloading it:

 xmlrpc localhost:8000 load_start ~/foo.torrent

See list of current downloads:
```
 xmlrpc localhost:8000 download_list
```

Start a torrent:

 xmlrpc localhost:8000 d.start 07BF391725A0891F3A1E84784B078D5EF337F82F

Stop a torrent:

 xmlrpc localhost:8000 d.stop 07BF391725A0891F3A1E84784B078D5EF337F82F

Get the status of a torrent:

 xmlrpc localhost:8000 d.state 07BF391725A0891F3A1E84784B078D5EF337F82F

There are a lot more commands. Try some of them for yourself. I admit that it’s difficult to find out how each command works this way, but in the absence of a comprehensive documentation, it seems to be the only way. There are a few examples here.

Complete Vagrant Setup

I have put the complete setup for use with vagrant in this github repository. Simply clone the repo, and run vagrant up in its directory. After the VM is up, you can access rtorrent on the forwarded port 8080:

xmlrpc localhost:8080 load_start /vagrant/foo.torrent

elektito programming & stuff

Controlling rtorrent with XML-RPC

Complete Vagrant Setup