rustTorrent

A modern, self-hostable BitTorrent client written in Rust — a single small binary with a clean web UI, a full HTTP API, and qBittorrent-compatible endpoints for the tools you already run.

Beta software. rustTorrent is under active development. Expect bugs, breaking changes, and incomplete features. Report issues.

Website: rusttorrent.dev · Live demo: rusttorrent.dev/demo · Discord: discord.gg/pu6chSqpnJ

Features

• Web UI — responsive React + TypeScript interface with a compact table view, detail panes, and dark mode. Works from any browser, desktop or mobile.
• HTTP API — everything the UI does is an API call: add torrents, query state, select files, stream content. Swagger documentation included.
• qBittorrent-compatible API — speaks the qBittorrent WebUI protocol, so Sonarr, Radarr, and other *arr applications connect without adapters.
• Full peer discovery — DHT, HTTP and UDP trackers, peer exchange, local service discovery, and UPnP port forwarding. Magnet links resolve metadata straight from the swarm.
• Streaming — play media files directly from incomplete torrents over HTTP.
• RSS automation — subscribe to feeds with filter rules and download new releases automatically.
• Docker ready — multi-stage build producing a minimal scratch-based image.
• Desktop app — native Tauri application for Windows, macOS, and Linux with system tray integration.
• Native desktop client — rtbit-fluent, a GPU-rendered client built on gpui with the Fluent design system, for managing a local or remote daemon. Linux .deb and binary and a signed Windows .exe ship with each release.
• Memory safe — written entirely in Rust; the bencode, DHT, and peer-protocol parsers are additionally fuzz-tested.

Quick start

Docker

docker run -d --name rusttorrent \
  -p 127.0.0.1:3030:3030 -p 4240:4240 \
  -v rtbit-db:/home/rtbit/db \
  -v rtbit-cache:/home/rtbit/cache \
  -v ~/downloads:/home/rtbit/downloads \
  -v ~/completed:/home/rtbit/completed \
  ghcr.io/thedancingdeveloper-org/rusttorrent:latest

Or build from the repository:

git clone https://github.com/TheDancingDeveloper-org/rustTorrent.git
cd rustTorrent
docker compose up --build -d

Ports: 3030 (web UI + API), 4240 (BitTorrent TCP + uTP). Publishing 3030 without an address, as -p 3030:3030 or the bundled compose file does, makes it reachable from your whole network. Until the first-run setup is complete, anyone who can reach that port can claim the setup, so finish setup before exposing it, or keep it on 127.0.0.1 as in the command above.

Volumes: the image declares four volumes. Mount all of them to keep state across container upgrades and removal.

Container path	Contents
/home/rtbit/db	Session, RSS, DHT and credential state (XDG_DATA_HOME). Back this up before upgrading.
/home/rtbit/cache	Cache data that can be rebuilt.
/home/rtbit/downloads	Default download folder for new torrents.
/home/rtbit/completed	Folder for completed torrents, when a completed folder is configured.

Image tags: latest and beta both point at the most recent v* release tag, and <tag> (for example v0.1.0-rc.1) is that release. Pin an exact tag when you need reproducible deployments. Other tags are used for development: staging tracks main, dev tracks the dev branch, and sha-<commit> is an immutable build of one commit. Container images are published for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 for release tags only; main and dev builds are linux/amd64.

Prebuilt binaries

Static binaries for Linux and Windows, with SHA256 checksums, are published at dl.rusttorrent.dev/latest:

curl -LO https://dl.rusttorrent.dev/latest/rtbit-linux-x86_64
chmod +x rtbit-linux-x86_64
./rtbit-linux-x86_64 server start ~/Downloads

The web UI comes up at http://localhost:3030.

From source

git clone https://github.com/TheDancingDeveloper-org/rustTorrent.git
cd rustTorrent
cargo build --release
./target/release/rtbit server start ~/Downloads

Requires a recent stable Rust (CI builds with 1.95) and Node.js/npm for the bundled web UI. See docs/TESTING.md for running the test suites.

Configuration

Most behaviour is configurable from the web UI's settings dialog or via CLI flags (rtbit --help). The first browser visit walks through authentication setup.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
crates/rtbit	CLI binary and server entry point
crates/librtbit	Core session, torrent state machine, storage, HTTP API, web UI
crates/librtbit-*	Protocol building blocks: bencode, DHT, peer protocol, trackers, UPnP, LSD
crates/rtbit-fluent	Native desktop client (gpui)
crates/rtbit-ui-core, crates/rtbit-client	Toolkit-free client state and the daemon API client it uses
desktop/	Tauri desktop application
website/	Static rusttorrent.dev website and deployment assets
fuzz/	Fuzz targets for the protocol parsers
docs/	Architecture notes, testing guide, fork provenance, release notes (docs/releases/)

CI

Pull requests run only the CI areas they touch; the merge queue runs the full suite before anything reaches main. See docs/ci.md.

Naming

The project has several names, and they refer to different things:

• rustTorrent is the project, the repository and the container image (rusttorrent).
• rtbit is the command-line program (rtbit server start …) and the crates/rtbit package.
• librtbit is the core engine library, in crates/librtbit. It is published as the swarmforge package, so depend on swarmforge and import librtbit. The other librtbit-* directories are published as swarmforge-* packages.
• rqbit is the upstream project this repository forks. Its name appears only in attribution.

Attribution

rustTorrent is a permanent hard fork of rqbit by Igor Katson, licensed under Apache 2.0. The original copyright and license notices are preserved; see NOTICE and docs/FORK_PROVENANCE.md for details of what was imported and when. We're grateful for Igor's work — rustTorrent builds on that foundation.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE. Each path in the repository is described in docs/REPOSITORY-LAYOUT.md. Contribution guidelines are in CONTRIBUTING.md, the release history is in CHANGELOG.md, and security reports follow SECURITY.md.