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

Python/asyncio based BitTorrent tracker

I just uploaded a Python/asyncio-based UDP BitTorrent tracker to my github account. It’s called pybtracker and you can find it here.

You can install pybtracker using pip by running pip3 install pybtracker. You’ll need Python 3.5. After installing pybtracker you can simply run it like pybtracker -b 127.0.0.1:8000 -O. An interactive client is also included which can be used by running pybtracker-client udp://127.0.0.1:8000 (update server address as you wish).

Letting AsyncIO choose a port for you

Say you are writing a test case for an AsyncIO-based network function. You want to write a test server and have the code being tested connect to it. You can choose a port number and hope it’s not taken when the test is run, or you can have a free port chosen for you each time the test is run. Simply pass 0 as the local port number:

    transport, protocol = await loop.create_datagram_endpoint(
        ServerProto, local_addr=('127.0.0.1', 0))
    

Afterwards, you can query the transport object for the port number chosen for you:

    server_addr, server_port = transport._sock.getsockname()
    

And that’s it; now you know the port number. I’m not sure if using a member variable with an underscore at the start of its name is the best or the official way to do this but it’s the best method I’ve found so far.

Python 3.5 in Emacs

April 2016 Update: Native support for Python 3.5 has finally landed in Emacs development branch. You don’t need this patch anymore.

Native co-routine support in Python 3.5 is really cool. So cool in fact that it finally made me switch from Python 2. I never was a big fan of Python 3, but that’s another story. The point is I’m finally ready to write some Python 3 code and I find out that my favorite editor (Emacs) does not support the new functionality. I don’t need anything fancy really. I just need proper syntax coloring, proper indentation and working navigation commands.

The indentation seems to be working fine in Emacs 24 already, but the other two are not. The best I could find was the patch accompanying this message on the Emacs mailing list. All I needed to do was to get Emacs source code (git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git; there, I probably just spared you one Google search!), make some minor modifications (see below) and apply the patch (git apply py35.diff).

One small thing missing in the patch was proper coloring for the new keyword await. Another problem was that the file locations are not the same as in the git head. I’ve made the proper adjustments to make it possible to apply the patch to the current master branch. You can download the updated patch from the link below.

I should really thank Lele Gaifax from the Emacs mailing list. You made my day stranger!

Download: py35.diff

First Post

This is the obligatory content-free first post in my blog. I’m sure numerous posts are coming soon to this blog. Or not! We shall see.