CREATE A TORRENT IN THE TERMINAL

2024-01-09 -

1 Install Buildtorrent

While flexible, qBittorrent doesn’t have the necessary functionality to create a torrent from the command line. Consequently, you need an extra piece of software. Arguably the easiest way to create a torrent from the terminal is to use Buildtorrent. You can install it with:

$ sudo apt install buildtorrent

2 Check the Buildtorrent help

Using Buildtorrent requires you to input a straightforward command that announces the torrent’s tracker and the data file you’re sharing. The format of this command is:

$ buildtorrent [OPTIONS] -a announceurl input output

However, it is worth taking a moment to check the help file (buildtorrent -h) to view further options.

3 Find a tracker server

To create a brand new torrent, you need a tracker server URL. Where do you find one? Various open trackers can be used. You’ll find a list of them online (https://bit.ly/LXF311-trackers) but we’re going to use the one provided by OpenBitTorrent: udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:6969

4 Check the ISO location

Before creating the torrent file, just take a moment to confirm the location of the ISO file you plan to share. This probably means browsing through directories using cd and ls , unless you already know the location and filename of the file for which you plan to create a torrent.

5 Create a torrent

Any file you have permission to use and share can be turned into a torrent. To illustrate, we’re going to use the Raspberry Pi OS from the main text:

$ buildtorrent -a udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:6969 2023-12-05-raspios-bookworm-armhf.img.xz pibookworm. torrent

Wait while the torrent is created. Larger .torrent files take longer.

6 Share the torrent file

With the torrent file created, it can now be shared online. While there are various ways you can do this, it seems appropriate that a Linux ISO torrent should be uploaded to LinuxTracker (https://bit.ly/LXF311-linuxtracker). Of course, duplicating torrents isn’t particularly useful to anyone, so consider ways in which you can safely customise a Linux distribution before sharing it.