rTorrent
RTorrent is a contender for the best, light-weight, torrent client. It’s terminal based, though there are web interfaces for it. In my testing it was second-best in terms of resource use.
The developer has recently picked it up again and is pulling in community contributions. My recent (Jan 2026) builds of it had segfault issues, but those may be cleaned up by now.
You can build and install on the same box, but if you’re running a seed box you may prefer to package it for deployment, so I’ve included both so you can:
or
Build and Install
LibTorrent
RTorrent depends on LibTorrent, also from this developer.
# on Debian 13 (Trixie)
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/rakshasa/libtorrent
cd libtorrent
sudo apt install build-essential autoconf libcurlpp-dev libtool
autoreconf -ivf
./configure
make
sudo make install
RTorrent
# Assuming you've already installed and built libtorrent on this box. Adjust branch after checking
git clone https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent --branch v0.16.6 --depth 1 rtorrent-0.16.6
sudo apt install libncurses-dev
autoreconf -ivf
./configure
make
sudo make install
Build and Package
Packaging things into a .deb is a bit of an adventure. But give it a try. Once you get it going you can probably use some sort of system to keep it up do date. Maybe do a repo and go full-debian on.
Assuming you’ve built and copied the packages:
sudo apt install ./libtorrent36_0.16.6-1_amd64.deb ./rtorrent_0.16.6-1_amd64.deb
# Connect to the console with
sudo -u rtorrent tmux a
# Disconnect from tmux to leave it running with
Ctrl-b d
You probably want to link it to other tools, like sonarr. They don’t talk SCGI, so you’ll need a proxy. Lightty is an easy way to do that.
sudo apt install lighttpd
sudo vi /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-rtorrent.conf
server.modules += ( "mod_scgi" )
scgi.server = (
"/RPC2" =>
( "127.0.0.1" =>
(
"socket" => "/home/user/rtorrent/rpc.socket",
"check-local" => "disable",
"disable-time" => 0, # don't disable SCGI if connection fails
)
# YOU MUST ADD SOME KIND OF AUTH
)
)
or possibly
"host" => "127.0.0.1",
"port" => 8080,
sudo lighty-enable-mod rtorrent
sudo systemctl restart lighttpd
You can test with a curl or xmlrpc (though you may need to add the latter)
curl -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data "<?xml version='1.0'?><methodCall><methodName>system.listMethods</methodName></methodCall>" http://127.0.0.1/RPC2
xmlrpc tpub/RPC2 system.listMethods
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