A Comparison of Three rTorrent Seedbox Web Frontends

August 11, 2009 by sharky

More and more seedbox providers are beginning to switch over to rTorrent/libTorrent as their offered BitTorrent client - and for good reason: rTorrent is natively Linux-based so it’s easy on resources; it’s open-source (new UIs and plugins can be developed); and it’s a whitelisted BT client on just about every private tracker. TorrentFlux is bloated and has a high learning curve, and uTorrent WebUI is nothing more than an afterthought with minimal features. rTorrent is taking over the seedbox world, thanks in large part to three popular rTorrent web front-ends — ruTorrent, wTorrent and rtGui.

ruTorrent

Homepage — http://code.google.com/p/rutorrent/

ruTorrent is the latest front-end for rTorrent, and also our personal favorite. In active development, it accomplishes everything that uTorrent WebUI should do (but doesn’t). Developed as a uTorrent clone, ruTorrent almost entirely resembles uTorrent running on a local machine (home PC). It’s packed with features, is extensible & lightweight, and supports addons which can also be created. There’s not a single thing missing from this excellent rTorrent web GUI.

Features include:

  • • Torrent creation
  • • RSS Feed support
  • • Labels appended to torrents for categorization
  • • Content menu (right-click) is supported
  • • Tabs for data (traffic, files, speed, peers etc.)
  • • The ability to select/deselect files in a torrent (partial seeding)
  • • Automatically updates in the browser every 3 seconds (by default)
  • • Multi-language support
  • • Easy-to-install plugins (which you won’t find for uTorrent)

Screenshots:

Main Index

Speed Graph

Torrent Creation

wTorrent

Homepage — http://www.wtorrent-project.org/trac/

Thought to be the most widely-used WebUI for rTorrent, wTorrent offers many of the features lacking in uTorrent WebUI, like extra torrent info and available space remaining on the server. But when compared to ruTorrent, wTorrent is light years behind and missing many key features, such as:

  • • No torrent creation in wTorrent
  • • Selecting/deselecting files in a torrent to download is supported, although it requires countless clicks (individual files need to be checked manually, one-by-one; although there is a check all function)
  • • Torrents that are added as private don’t automatically appear on the main index page (are listed under the Private tab)
  • • WebUI does not automatically refresh the screen at a set interval (although this can be hacked using this Firefox addon)

Having said that, wTorrent does offer some decent functionality through Java & Ajax. Listed torrents can be opened up, which then displays 4 new tabs on the left side (see second screenshot below):

  • • Information (default) — Shows the data path, data uploaded, ratio and setting the priority.
  • • Files — Lists the individual files in each torrent. This is where files can be selected or removed from the download list.
  • • Trackers — Shows the current trackers listed for the torrent. This is where trackers can be removed from the list (although no new trackers can be added, nor changed).
  • • Peers — Lists the peers connected in the torrent.

About RSS feeds in wTorrent: While we were able to successfully add an RSS download feed, we weren’t able to actually add new torrent jobs (from the feed) to index page, or anywhere else. Editing the feed appears to still be a broken feature. One alternative method to saving .torrent files is to use the "add torrents to wTorrent" greasemonkey userscript. This will add a small "w" to the torrent download page, where torrents can then be imported directly into wTorrent from the tracker.

Screenshots:

Main Index

Additional Torrent Tabs / Options

rtGui

Homepage — http://code.google.com/p/rtgui/

rtGui is an overlooked, but fairly complete web GUI for rTorrent. By default, the rtGui webpage is automatically refreshed at 5 second intervals in the browser. Here’s a useful installation guide for Ubuntu.

Features include:

  • • List all torrent downloads or by started/stopped/complete/incomplete/seeding status
  • • Ajax-style refresh without reloading page
  • • Sort view by any of the displayed columns
  • • View detailed torrent information
  • • Stop/start/hash-check torrent
  • • Set upload/download speed cap
  • • Add torrents by URL
  • • Upload torrent to rtorrent watch-directory
  • • Set priority per torrent or file
  • • Peer listing
  • • RSS Feed of completed torrents (rssfeed.php)
  • • Does not require mySQL or any other database
  • • Bulk Stop/Start/Delete/Priority set
  • • Tracker URL display with configurable colouring
  • • Filter torrent list by tracker

I actually prefer rtGui over wTorrent, for the simple fact that it automatically refreshes the page (an important criteria for any torrent webUI). rtGui is still missing a few features that can be found in ruTorrent, such as torrent creation and tracker RSS feeds are not yet supported.

Each torrent job can be clicked, which opens up a variety of options (see second screenshot below) - including:

  • • Files listed in each torrent job (these can be selected or removed here)
  • • Trackers listed in each torrent
  • • Peers connected
  • • Detailed torrent statistics
  • • Storage options

Screenshots:

Main Index

Additional Torrent Tabs / Options

Other rTorrent/libTorrent UIs

rTWi — http://projects.cyla.homeip.net/rtwi/

nTorrent — http://code.google.com/p/ntorrent/

n2hell — http://code.google.com/p/n2hell/

~ A special thanks to Xirvik-Torrent for allowing FSF to use their server ~



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