BitTornado is a fork of the original Python BitTorrent distribution, made by John Hoffman to add some experimental features, most (if not all) of which are now standard in other clients and trackers. The last official release was made in 2006, and thus many newer features are missing, but BitTornado is also an accessible Python library, and has several simple tools for editing torrent files.

After several years of intermittent modifications, cleanups and modernization, it seems like a good time to give this code an actual version number. All applications have been tested and work as well as they did in version 0.3.18. The library components have been substantially reorganized, so this is highly likely to break dependent applications.

A single file can be downloaded with any of the following commands:

btdownloadheadless.py myfile.torrent
btdownloadcurses.py myfile.torrent
btdownloadgui.py myfile.torrent

A directory of files can be downloaded with any of the following commands:

btlaunchmany.py mydir
btlaunchmanycurses.py mydir

Attempting to download an already downloaded file will seed it.

First, you need a tracker. If you're on a dynamic IP or otherwise unreliable connection, you should find someone else's tracker and use that. Otherwise, follow the rest of this step.

Trackers refer downloaders to each other. The load on the tracker is very small, so you only need one for all your files.

To run a tracker, execute the command bttrack.py Here is an example -

bttrack.py --port 6969 --dfile dstate

--dfile is where persistent information is kept on the tracker across invocations. It makes everything start working again immediately if you restart the tracker. A new one will be created if it doesn't exist already.

The tracker must be on a net-addressible box, and you must know the ip number or dns name of it.

The tracker outputs web logs to standard out. You can get information about the files it's currently serving by getting its index page.

btmakemetafile.py http://my.tracker:6969/announce myfile.ext

This will generate a file called myfile.ext.torrent

Make sure to include the port number in the tracker url if it isn't 80.

This command may take a while to scan over the whole file hashing it.

The /announce path is special and hard-coded into the tracker. Make sure to give the domain or ip your tracker is on instead of my.tracker.

You can use either a dns name or an IP address in the tracker url.

btcompletedir.py http://my.tracker:6969/announce mydir

This will generate a torrent file for each file in mydir.

btmaketorrentgui.py and bt-t-make.py provide GUI interfaces for creating single torrent files or directories of files.

To view metadata encoded in the torrent file:

btshowmetainfo.py myfile.torrent

To set the announce tracker of a torrent file:

btreannounce.py http://mytracker.com:6969/announce myfile.torrent

To copy the announce information from one file to another:

btcopyannounce.py source.torrent destination.torrent

To set the default download name:

btrename.py myfile.torrent targetFileName.ext

To set HTTP seeds:

btsethttpseeds http://example.net/myfile myfile.torrent

To remove HTTP seeds:

btsethttpseeds 0 myfile.torrent