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

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.