Downpour BitTorrent Client

Rating: 5.0/5 (7 votes)

Downpour is a web-based BitTorrent client. It supports auto-downloading from RSS feeds and automatic importing and renaming of downloads into a media library, making it ideal for use on a home media server.

Screenshot of the main download window

Downpour is licensed under the GPLv2.

Features
Download
Dependencies
Installation
Starting Downpour
Stopping Downpour
Debugging
Hacking

Features

Background downloading of files via BitTorrent and HTTP
Remote web interface for managing downloads
Monitor RSS feeds for new media and automatically add new items to the download queue
Intelligent detection of media metadata
Automatic import of completed downloads into a local media library following your own file organization and renaming rules (based on media metadata)
Local media library browser
Rate, connection and concurrent download limiting
Multiple user support for shared servers

Download

Current release: Downpour v0.1

Older releases

There are no binary packages of Downpour yet.

Dependencies

Downpour is written in Python.

Required modules:

Installation

Unpack the source package into a local directory
Download and install python-libtorrent from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libtorrent/files/
Run the following command as root in the directory you unpacked Downpour into:

python setup.py install

If you do not have root access, you can install it in your user directory with:

python setup.py install --user
Copy cfg/downpour.cfg to /etc/downpour.cfg and customize it

Downpour is also on PyPI, but easy_install fails since it tries to copy an executable outside the installation sandbox. If anyone know how to correctly have easy_install add an executable to /usr/bin, please send me an email!

Starting Downpour

To start the downpour daemon, run the following command:

downpourd -c [config-file]

(Note: the daemon does not run on Windows yet; Windows users can only launch it in debug mode (see below). If anyone wants to create a real launcher for Windows, please email it to me at jeremy@jongsma.org.)

When launching as root, you can specify the user or group to run as with "--user" and "--group". Specifying a user or group on the command line is unnecessary if you have already specified one in downpour.cfg, since Downpour will automatically drop privileges after setup (useful if you want to use port 80 for the web interface.) User and group options are not available on Windows.

Run "downpourd --help" to view additional runtime options.

You can access the web interface at http://localhost:6280 (or whatever address/port you configured in downpour.cfg.) The default login is "admin" / "password". You can change the admin password in "My Account" once logged in, or setup additional users in the "Users" section.

Stopping Downpour

To stop the daemon, run the following command:

downpourd stop

It may take a few seconds to stop while it cleanly closes all bittorrent connections.

Debugging

To prevent Downpour from detaching from the console (and to view debugging messages), run the following command:

downpourd -c [config-file] -d

This is currently the only way to run Downpour on Windows.

To report a bug found in Downpour, please go to the Launchpad bug tracker.

Hacking

You can get a current development snapshot from SVN at http://home.jongsma.org/svn/downpour/trunk.

The main module code is in downpour/. You can immediately view your changes by running ./downpour-debug.sh in the main directory.

Jeremy Jongsma