rTorrent and wTorrent on OSX

In what seems to be a never ending quest to use every BitTorrent client ever written I’ve made the transition to using rTorrent. I run it on my HTPC so that Podcasts and TV shows are right there to watch. However, because rTorrent can be a pain to get working and since it’s much friendlier to use with a web interface I’m providing this simple guide to get it working on OSX.

It’s possible to compile from source, but the easiest solutions is to install it from MacPorts, this will take care off all the dependencies for you. Just install MacPorts and follow the steps described to add it to your PATH. In a terminal enter:

port install rtorrent-devel +xmlrpc

This will install the latest available port with xmlrpc support (explained later). Now that you have this great console BT client installed you can configure it to do many useful things. Setup watch directories to look for new torrents, configure it to move or run scripts when a transfer completes, AND best of all setup a pretty web interface so you don’t have to control it with ’screen’.

Download the latest wTorrent source from here, and follow the setup guide with a few minor changes for OSX:

Instead of installing xmlrpc-c from source, you can install it from MacPorts:

port install xmlrpc-c

Ignore everything about lighttpd, its easier to just use Apache which is already built into OSX, so follow the ‘Using mod_scgi for apache’ steps. Install mod_scgi as directed, but before you go any further we need to modify Apache so that it will properly load the module. The OSX Apache binary is compiled with PPC, PPC64, x86, and x64 support and this prevents mod_scgi from loading at startup. To fix this, issue the following commands:

cd /usr/sbin

sudo mv ./httpd ./httpd.fat

file ./httpd.fat

Here, you can see that this ‘fat’ binary has 4 supported architectures. To fix that we liposuction out that ‘fat’.

sudo lipo ./httpd.fat -thin i386 -output ./httpd.i386

sudo ln -s ./httpd.i386 ./httpd

file ./httpd.i386

Now, you can see that the binary has been stripped down to the x86 architecture. Enable OSX’s ‘Web Sharing’ and Apache and mod_scgi will work fine. Continue the steps in the wTorrent install guide and you will soon have a sexy web interface to control your transfers remotely.

wTorrent doesn’t have as many features as Torrentflux-b4rt, but it backed by the very powerful rTorrent, which makes up for what it lacks. Plus wTorrent is under steady development so new features are coming all the time.

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Published:: 5.17.08 at 7pm

Category:: BitTorrent

Bittorrent » rTorrent and wTorrent on OSX 5.17.08 / 11pm

[...] Multiple Entendre wrote an interesting post today on rTorrent and wTorrent on OSXHere’s a quick excerptIn what seems to be a never ending quest to use every BitTorrent client ever written I’v e made the transition to using rTorrent…. [...]

royger 5.19.08 / 12pm

Thanks fo the guide, can I put a link on wtorrent site pointing here?

I’m sorry for the lack of features, I’m a college student and although I try to improve it as much as I can I also have quite a lot of work so my time is limited. If you want any special feature post it on the trac and I will try to get it done asap

Brian 5.19.08 / 1pm

No problem royger, I’m just glad that there is a pretty interface to rTorrent, hopefully an OSX user of wTorrent will find my guide useful.
As a fairly recent grad, I understand the lack of time for projects like these. I’d love to help out, but I have neither the time or PHP skills right now.

Tom 5.24.08 / 8am

xmlrpc-c won’t build for me. I have tried ‘clean’ but still having issues.

Brian 5.24.08 / 9am

No clue man, thats a MacPort issue, check with them.

royger 5.30.08 / 8am

Here’s a manual about how to compile rtorrent statically on Mac OS X with xmlrpc-c:
http://rakshasa.no/pipermail/libtorrent-devel/2008-May/001620.html
It might be of some help if xmlrpc-c in MacPorts is broken.

tom 5.31.08 / 2pm

where must I put the wtorrent folder in order to run the install2.php ?

Brian 5.31.08 / 3pm

Tom, put it in ‘/Users/yourname/Sites’, and then you can access it from http://localhost/~yourname/wtorrent. You may need to chmod the wtorrent directory so that it can execute and write files. ‘chmod -R 777 /Users/yourname/Sites/wtorrent’.

rodrigo 6.9.08 / 8am

so, i have followed all of the steps, have rtorrent with xmlrpc running (states XMLRPC initialized with 444 functions), and i’ve set up wtorrent. however, wtorrent persistently gives me the following error:

Error: could not connect to rtorrent

here is a copy of my home.conf.php file:
rodrigolois.net/home.conf.txt

and i’ve added the following line to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf after creating and installing the module:

LoadModule scgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_scgi.so

and the following lines to /etc/httpd/httpd.conf:

SCGIMount /RPC2 127.0.0.1:5000

AuthName “Private”
AuthType Basic
AuthBasicProvider file
AuthUserFile /htpasswd
Require user rodie

any idea what could be wrong?

Brian 6.10.08 / 7pm

Not sure rodrigo, I didn’t setup mine up with a htpasswd file so that could be one thing. Another thing to try on the commandline is ‘xmlrpc localhost system.listMethods’ if that works then everything else should work fine and it may be an issue in wtorrent. Also, you have to restart Apache after modifying the httpd.conf file.

tom 6.16.08 / 5pm

I finally have it all up and running, I just have an error displayed over the top of the main wtorrent page….

Warning: disk_total_space() [function.disk-total-space]: No such file or directory in /Users/tomplum/Sites/wtorrent/cls/rtorrent.cls.php on line 310

Warning: disk_free_space() [function.disk-free-space]: No such file or directory in /Users/tomplum/Sites/wtorrent/cls/rtorrent.cls.php on line 310
0B/
Warning: disk_total_space() [function.disk-total-space]: No such file or directory in /Users/tomplum/Sites/wtorrent/cls/rtorrent.cls.php on line 314
0B Free:
Warning: disk_free_space() [function.disk-free-space]: No such file or directory in /Users/tomplum/Sites/wtorrent/cls/rtorrent.cls.php on line 306
0B
Download rate: 0.76KB/s Upload rate: 0.59KB/s

any idea what this is?

Tom

I tried to reconfigure wtorrent but I am now getting this error . .
Fatal error: Smarty error: the $compile_dir ‘tpl_c/’ does not exist, or is not a directory. in /Users/tomplum/Sites/wtorrent/lib/smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 1092

royger 6.19.08 / 7am

To remove the error about disk functions you just have to set the constant:
define( ‘DIR_DOWNLOAD’, ‘/data/’);
in your home.conf.php to an existing dir:
define( ‘DIR_DOWNLOAD’, ‘/’);
(This way you will get the remaining space in the whole filesystem).

About the tpl_c error please check that you have a tpl_c dir inside the wtorrent folder and that it has the permisions set to 777 (chmod -R 777 tpl_c)

Multiple Entendre » Python rTorrent proxy class 6.28.08 / 10pm

[...] My script sends messages over HTTP and needs a webserver running on the rTorrent host (see my wTorrent setup guide) and encapsulates a bunch of XMLRPC commands so you can automatically retrieve information on [...]

Casual Norb 8.25.08 / 3pm

If you did a search/replace of DIR_DOWNLOAD with “/” in wtorrent/cls/rtorrent.cls.php, would that result in a combination of no errors, correct disk space reporting, and not having to type out the data location manually whenever you add a torrent?

I’d test it, but I’m not running it on a Mac :p

don rikter 10.21.08 / 1pm

I’ve managed to get rtorrent installed with macports along with xmlrpc-c, but mod_scgi is failing on my 10.5.5. I got the source from here: http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/files/mod_scgi/scgi-1.9.tar.gz

since I couldn’t find a macport.

but my vanilla 10.5.5 has a mod_scgi_pubsub.so is mod_scgi already installed and/or is there a package already modified to compile on 10.5.5?

Thanks,
Don

don rikter 10.21.08 / 3pm

sorry for the double post but i found the 1.13 release which compiles from here:
http://python.ca/scgi/
also I found a modified Makefile to use rather than lipo’ing the fat binary:
http://osdir.com/ml/python.qp/2008-07/msg00000.html

APXS=apxs

# Extra args for building a multi-architecture version OS X 10.5.
UNIVERSAL=”-arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64″

all:
$(APXS) -c mod_scgi.c

install:
$(APXS) -i -c mod_scgi.c

universal:
$(APXS) -c -Wl,$(UNIVERSAL) -Wc,$(UNIVERSAL) mod_scgi.c

install_universal:
$(APXS) -i -c -Wl,$(UNIVERSAL) -Wc,$(UNIVERSAL) mod_scgi.c

clean:
rm -rf mod_scgi.o mod_scgi.lo mod_scgi.slo mod_scgi.la .libs

Jamie 2.19.09 / 4pm

Thanks for the make file don, that really helps to preserve the setup even with future (most likely) universal updates to apache from Apple. For any others looking to head down that path if you want to further automate the make process you can add the “-a” flag after “-i” in the install_universal make command and apxs will automatically add LoadModule entries to your httpd.conf.

Tom 9.2.09 / 12pm

updated guide for Snow Leopard?

Brian 9.7.09 / 9am

I haven’t been able to upgrade my server to snow leopard yet, but I’ll update the guide as soon as I do. I’m curious to see how the new 64 bit kernel effects the binaries, like apache, to see whether they still need to be lipo’d.

Mike 9.14.09 / 4am

Thanks for getting me this far, but I’m utterly confused. I’ve managed to install rTorrent on Mac OS X Server 10.5.8. I can’t seem to find its configuration file, but I haven’t done much digging there.

My bigger problem, though, is installing SCGI. It sounds like the wTorrent page you link to once contained SCGI installation instructions, but doesn’t anymore.

I’d prefer to use Don’s instructions from the comments, but I can’t get them to work. Would you still recommend trimming the fat apache binary? I’m concerned the Mac OS X installer might break this in the future.

I’d really really appreciate it if you could expand on installing SCGI. That seems to be my stumbling point – I’m not a complete newbie with the command line, but compiling is still pretty foreign to me.

Thank you for an otherwise great tutorial! I’m really excited to get this working.

Mike 9.29.09 / 11pm

So, I gave in and trimmed the fat apache binary. I’m trying to get wTorrent/rTorrent running on a Power Mac G5 with 10.5.8, though, so rather than making a new i386 binary, I made a ppc binary. So far, so good. This worked:

sudo lipo ./httpd.fat -thin ppc7400 -output ./httpd.ppc7400
sudo ln -s ./httpd.ppc7400 ./httpd

Oddly enough, my binary only has two architectures:

$ file httpd-1.3
httpd-1.3: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
httpd-1.3 (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
httpd-1.3 (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc

So, I couldn’t have tried 32-bit PowerPC, even if I wanted to.

Unfortunately, when starting apache with the mod_scgi module enabled, I get this error:

httpd: Syntax error on line 172 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Can’t locate API module structure `mod_scgi’ in file /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_scgi.so: dlsym(0×111210, mod_scgi): symbol not found

Any idea at all? I can’t find anything for this error on Google. Line 172 of httpd.conf just enables/disables mod_scgi, nothing more. Heck, Server Admin created that line, not me.

Besides this, I guess the only thing left I can try to get wTorrent working is to install lighttpd, but that seems like a tremendous task to me. Help?

Multiple Entendre

rTorrent and wTorrent on OSX

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