rTorrent / ruTorrent

rTorrent is a powerful and lightweight command-line BitTorrent client. ruTorrent is not a torrent client — it is a web-based frontend (WebUI) for rTorrent.

Tips and tricks

Accessing rTorrent directly

rTorrent runs inside a tmux session. To connect to it directly:

tmux attach

Disable Filebot / olaris-rename

See the dedicated guide: How to disable Filebot

Changing the ruTorrent password

Connect via SSH and run:

htpasswd -b $HOME/www/rutorrent/.htpasswd USERNAME PASSWORD

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with your actual values.

Installing additional ruTorrent plugins

⚠️ Plugins can slow down ruTorrent — keep this in mind before installing additional ones.

Unpack the plugin to ~/www/rutorrent/plugins/. Reload the ruTorrent page for the plugin to be activated.

If you see a "Cannot access XXX" error after reloading, the plugin likely has an external package dependency. Raise a support ticket with the full error message.

RSS plugin refresh interval

By default, ruTorrent checks RSS feeds every 30 minutes. To change this, go to Settings → Feed and set your preferred interval.

⚠️ Check your trackers' rules — some will ban you for polling RSS feeds too frequently.

Setting up Transdroid

See the dedicated guide: Transdroid

Whitelist labels for Filebot processing

To restrict Filebot processing to specific labels (e.g. TV and Movies), edit ~/.config/rtorrent/filebot and replace the contents with the following:

#!/bin/bash

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

TORRENT_PATH=$1
TORRENT_NAME=$2
TORRENT_LABEL=$3

# Subtitle language
SUBLANG=en
SKIP_EXTRACT=n
MUSIC=y

if [[ $TORRENT_LABEL == "TV" ]] || [[ $TORRENT_LABEL == "Movies" ]]
then
    filebot -script fn:amc --def music=$MUSIC --def skipExtract=$SKIP_EXTRACT \
        -non-strict --encoding utf8 --def ut_kind=multi --log all --log-file amc.log \
        --def "ut_dir=$TORRENT_PATH" "ut_title=$TORRENT_NAME" \
        --output "$HOME/media" --action symlink --conflict override \
        --def subtitles=$SUBLANG --def artwork=false \
        --def extractfolder="$HOME/torrents/extracted" &
else
    exit
fi

Feel free to change TV and Movies to any labels you use.

Enable file deletion from the ruTorrent web UI

Add the following line to ~/.config/rtorrent/rtorrent.rc, then restart the app:

method.set_key = event.download.erased,delete_erased,"execute=rm,-rf,--,$d.base_path="

Troubleshooting

ERROR: Bad response from server (500) — Link to XMLRPC failed

rTorrent is not running. Go to your installed applications and restart rTorrent.

ERROR: Bad response from server (502 Bad Gateway)

The web server failed to return data in time. Steps to resolve:

Check your internet connection
Reload the ruTorrent page
Wait a few minutes
Restart the rTorrent app from your dashboard

Rtorrent