Torrent client for the command-line?

Question

Yesterday one of my friends asked me if there is some torrent client that runs on the command-line.

I had no answer for him, but I think that you have some.

Answer 1

Deluge is controllable by gui, web, and console.

To setup remote access to a deluge server see the thinclient guide.

deluge-console

deluge-gtk

deluge-web

Answer 2

I think the default torrent client transmission itself has a cli interface and can be installed with

sudo apt-get install transmission-cli

Answer 3

I use rtorrent on a headless server to serve Debian and Ubuntu ISOs, works quite well and can saturate my network link. Dependencies and memory usage are minimal.

Answer 4

aria2 (sf.net) is a multi-protocol & multi-source, cross platform download utility. The supported protocols are HTTP(S), FTP, BitTorrent, Metalink. It can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/aria2/wiki/UsageExample#BitTorrentDownload

Example command-line installation and usage:

$ sudo apt-get install -y aria2
$ aria2c http://gtf.org/garzik/bitcoin/bootstrap.dat.torrent

Answer 5

Yes. I use ctorrent as my primary client. Usually from within tmux.

sudo apt-get install ctorrent

Answer 6

WebTorrent

WebTorrent is a streaming torrent client for node.js and the browser. It also has a command line app.

Installation

npm install webtorrent -g
webtorrent --help

You need to have node.js and npm installed for using webtorrent.

To download a torrent:

webtorrent magnet_uri

Answer 7

I was looking for a torrent client for ubuntu server a few weeks ago.I didn't found anything interesting but µTorrent server.It runs a web interface which can be accessible from serveraddress:8000/gui.

Here is a screenshot of the web interface:

It can be downloaded from http://www.utorrent.com/downloads/linux

Configuration manual is included in the downloaded package (You wont install it.Only configure it and run the executable when you want to use it.).Be aware that this is a alpha version and it may have some problems.They say this version is only for 32bit linux but I used it on my 64bit server and I didn't experienced any problems.

Another option is rtorrent, a CLI application.It's not user-friendly and I had problems with different torrent files.You can install it from repositories:

sudo apt-get install rtorrent

Answer 8

Or you could run install deluge torrent, run it as a daemon, and access it through Web Interface or remote apps (eg. Transdroid on Android).

Answer 9

There are some torrent clients that you can run on a headless server. I dunno if you can control them via console, but the following clients are controllable via web interface:

• torrentflux
• deluge

Torrentflux is available in the Ubuntu repositories, but I think in a quite outdated version now.

Deluge can be obtained from the getdeb repositories. It also has a GUI client software that you could run from your desktop and connect to the "headless client" running on your server to control it.