Package-based rTorrent Installation

This page contains instructions for a package-based installation of rTorrent on various platforms.

1. Introduction

While installing using pre-compiled packages is the easiest way to get a working rtorrent executable onto your system, it has the unfortunate side-effect that quite often these packages contain a rather outdated version of it. You might want to look in the "testing" or "experimental" repositories of your distribution, or alternatively install from source.

2. Debian and derivatives

apt-get install rtorrent

3. FreeBSD

pkg_add -r rtorrent

(note: On FreeBSD, the preferred method of install is to use the ports system)

If you do not have the ports tree, you can easily add it with the following:

portsnap fetch extract

To install via ports:

cd /usr/ports/net-p2p/rtorrent
make config
make install

(note: The default config options are fine, just leave them alone unless you know what they do. This will build rtorrent with xmlrpc-c and kqueue polling)

4. Mac OSX

TODO Mac ports or whatever

5. Arch Linux

pacman -S rtorrent

See the Arch wiki for more.

6. Special Platforms

6.1. Windows

TODO Rumour has it there is a cygwin port...

6.2. QNAP NAS

TODO Some QNAP user has to help here

6.3. Solaris and Solaris based OS's (OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, Nexenta, ect)

The packages available in most solaris based operating systems are hugely outdated. You can install 0.8.2 on OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana and Solaris 11 Express by using the following command:

pkg install rtorrent

If you want instructions for building rTorrent on one of these platforms, see BuildingonSolaris