rTorrent on Alpine

This is a bare-bones docker container for rTorrent. The GUI output is locked out, instead a unix socket is exposed for you to use with a plain webserver, ruTorrent/Flood or what have you.

Configuration

The container creates a "sane defaults" configuration that is tailored to the technicalities of docker (and this specific container). You are encouraged (but not required) to use it. You can bootstrap it to a config volume by running the container like so: docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)/config:/config" looselyrigorous/rtorrent bootstrap

Running

You could use docker for this but I prefer compose files. Nevertheless, you can use something like this

docker run -itd \
	-v ./downloads:/downloads \
	-v ./session:/session \
	-v ./watch:/watch \
	-v ./config:/config \
	-v rtorrent-sock:/socket \
	-p 49161:49161 \
	-p 49161:49161/udp \
	-e PUID=1000 -e PGID=1000 \
	looselyrigorous/rtorrent:0.3.3

Look like a pain in the ass to paste and edit? Well that's because it is. Just use a compose file:

version: "3"
services:
  rtorrent:
    image: looselyrigorous/rtorrent:0.3.3
    volumes:
      - "./downloads:/downloads"
      - "./session:/session"
      - "./watch:/watch"
      - "./config:/config"
      - "rtorrent-sock:/socket"
    ports:
      - "49161:49161"
      - "49161:49161/udp"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
volumes:
  rtorrent-sock: {}

Save it as docker-compose.yml . Now all you have to do is docker-compose up -d and you're off to the races. There are docker-compose files in the compose directory for more complete setups.

Volumes

Volume	Explanation
/downloads	Your downloads.
/session	rTorrent specific folder. Used for persistence accross restarts
/watch	Watch folder for .torrent files
/config	rTorrent configuration
/socket	The rTorrent Unix socket

Environment Variables

Before attempting to launch the container, you should make sure that the volumes you mount are owned by the same UID/GID's you provide as env vars. The container will chown all dirs except /downloads. So just chown your Downloads folder, then set PUID and PGID accordingly, and it just works™.

Ports

The container exposes 49160/udp for DHT and 49161/{tcp,udp} for incoming connections. DHT is disabled by default but it's fairly trivial to enable it. The XMLRPC port is not enabled on rTorrent and therefore not exposed. This is a bad idea anyway cause it doesn't support any kind of authentication. You can instead forward requests to the socket through an nginx proxy with digest authentication.