provide a headless rtorrentd

[infinity0]

Would it be possible to provide a daemon version of rtorrent that doesn't have a UI and just sits there waiting for XML RPC requests? At the moment, I need to mess around with screen - if i just do rtorrent & disown, XML RPCs hang for some reason.

It doesn't even need to background itself, since start-stop-daemon can handle this pretty easily. (Actually, if you did make it background itself by using fork(), you would also need to create a pidfile somewhere so start-stop-daemon can get at the new pid).

It would be really useful for scripting things with torrents. transmission-daemon is the only other client that comes close in this regard, but their RPC client doesn't output machine-parseable data, and for some reason it's not connecting properly for my setup (but rtorrent does). Also they don't support the http_cacert options which is pretty important for what I want to do (encrypted backup over bittorrent).

[rakshasa]

It is one of those things I've wanted to do for a long time, but never got around to.

However with the improved logging facilities, etc, I might consider doing it... Well, at some point in time at least.

[riotopsys]

consider using rtorrent with screen you can get rtorrent to act as if it were a daemon.

[infinity0]

that is what I'm doing currently, but this is not a clean solution. to shutdown rtorrent cleanly you need to send it a INT signal, but there is no way to get start-stop-daemon (the standard daemon manager on debian-based systems) to make screen send signals to the underlying child process.

[lvella]

Up to this! Lately I've been using Transmission, but it is not the same thing...

[gclawes]

I know in gentoo there is an init-script provided that works well under gentoo's OpenRC init framework. Don't know how generally applicable/portable the same concepts would be

[sallyswiss]

I modified rtorrent so that if it does not run in a terminal ncurses is not initialized and rtorrent does not crash. this means it can run headless. this should solve the problem described. see my fork of rtorrent. I sent a pull request yesterday for another issue but do not see how to send another one for this.

[sallyswiss]

found the problem. I needed to send pull request from different branch. new pull request for this issue sent.

[awh-tokyo]

Is there any reason this pull request was never accepted? What I'm doing now (with screen) just seems clunky.

[rolfyone]

I'm pretty keen on this enhancement also... I might fork and import it myself...

[munnerz]

Looks like a PR has been merged for this, just awaiting it landing in a release: #446

[rraallvv]

Is headless mode supported in 0.9.6 ?

[chros73]

No, only in 0.9.7.

[rraallvv]

@chros73 Thanks. Nevertheless, I was able to use screen with 0.9.6 for a "sort of" headless mode.

[chros73]

Yes, or tmux. That's how the majority of people use rtorrent.

[rraallvv]

@chros73 Awesome! I'll check out tmux too then. Thanks.

[phxn]

tmux gets my vote too, it’s extremely useful.