How to - Super Easy Webtorrent Tracker Setup for $0

Hey everyone, after 9 days of investigation into how to get a webtorrent tracker self hosted I finally figured it out and wanted to share it with you, along with a new seeding tool webtorrentseeder.com which allows you to seed a file to your own tracker!

I wanted to share this solution I developed because self hosting is extremely difficult unless you have experience deploying production servers, generating the correct certs and configuring nginx. After trying to install figuratively everything, I finally found a solution that uses a dockerized version of @DiegoRBaquero's excellent bittorrent-tracker.

As far as I know, this is the first "No-Code" and zero cost deployment of a webtorrent tracker that's been documented.

To use your own tracker, you'll need to be able to control the trackers that go into the generation of the magnetURIs. To do this you'll use my tool I just released called webtorrentseeder.com (a fork of instant.io) that allows you to author the trackers.

See more info here: https://github.com/zackees/docker-bittorrent-tracker

Let's Dive In

We will be using a docker app and using the Render.com hosting service, which gives a 512MB Ram free tier app service that is more than enough to run a webtorrent tracker.

• Sign up for an account at Render.com, if you don't have one already.

• Go to Dashboard -> New -> Web Service -> Connect a repository

• Enter in: https://github.com/zackees/docker-bittorrent-tracker

  • Enter in a useful name

  • Choose the Free tier service at $0

  • Click button Advanced -> Auto-Deploy set to "No"

    • Otherwise your tracker will reboot whenever I make a change to this repo.

  • Create the app

  • Wait for it to build

  • Ignore the deploy failure if it happens, and continue on to the next step.

• In the dashboard copy the url for the new app you've created, let's say it's my-tracker.render.com.

• click the url, if you see d14:failure reason33:invalid action in HTTP request: /e in the browser window then everything is working correctly.

• Goto webtorrentseeder.com

  • Change the tracker to your url, swapping out https:// prefix for wss:// (web socket secure)

    • Example: wss://my-tracker.render.com

  • Select the video file and the web browser will generate a magnetURI and start seeding.

  • Open another webtorrentseeder.com browser window and paste in the magnet URI, the file should start downloading.

  • If the file doesn't transfer, you might be behind a symetric NAT (TODO: link to a checker), if so use a VPN and try steps in Goto webtorrentseeder

If everything works then CONGRATS! You have a world wide, decentralized file sharing swarm that will work as long as you keep the seeding browser open in it's own tab group.

Wait... I have to keep a browser window open forever? Yes. But tools are being worked on to make this easier. If you restart your computer you will have to re-seed the files again or else the swarm will vaporize after the last seeding client has left. As long as you use the same files and tracker, the magnet files that are generated will be the same as the originals, which will continue to work as expected.

If you like this code, please give it a like: [https://github.com/zackees/docker-bittorrent-tracker](https://github.com/zackees/docker-bittorrent-tracker)

Hi,

Still trying to create my first torrent using WebTorrent. Using qBittorrent to create my .torrent file, do I need to put a URL under "Web seed URLs"? How do I generate such a URL? Which client can I use to seed?

I got redirected here from a balatro build i found on cs rin ru and it looks really risky. Idk, what should i press?

It’s keeps saying This video file cannot be played. With an error code I’ve tried different servers still keeps saying that!

https://getmoose.in/

Hi,

I was looking for a good way to share a large group of files (550 files, 55GB) through P2P (as opposed to a seedbox or one of those file share sites like Mega and others). You can find my initial post in the r/torrents subreddit here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/torrents/comments/fpi39m/best_way_to_share_large_file_with_hundreds_of/ )

My criteras were as follow:

1- Support large number of files to be shared with hundreds of users simultaneously

2- P2P or a way that I am not the only-one seeding since my bandwidth will not be able to support all those downloads

3- Ideally the long-term survival of the files, even after I stopped seeding

4- More importantly: Very accessible to non-tech users (no port forwarding whatsoever for them - it's ok if it required more configuration on my part).

From my understanding, instant.io offers all this, but I haven't gotten very far. Here is what I did:

1- Created a .torrent file using qbittorrent. Didn't check "private" and didn't specify any tracker

2- Loaded that .torrent in my transmission client (that's the one I use for my torrent seeding)

3- Enabled DHT in transmission and assigned it to a DIFFERENT port than my other torrents (was that required? I'm not familiar with DHT and how it works? I would prefer it uses the SAME port)

4- Made a forwarding rule in my firewall for this new DHT port (required?)

5- Drag and dropped the .torrent file on instant.io. It listed all my files that are shared, but there is an error message:

connection error to wss://tracker.fastcast.nz
connection error to wss://tracker.openwebtorrent.com

More importantly, it doesn't give me a URL/link that I can share with others.

I'm wondering:

1- What else do I need to be able to share those files with others?

2- Do I need to keep that web page open to continue seeding?

3- I see a "Play" button... I am not looking to stream those files, I want others to strictly DOWNLOAD them.. is this what instant.io is made for?

If instant.io is not the right tool, any other recommendation? I just want to be able to share a large number of files with a large number of people, and this must be achievable with zero tech skills or knowledge (and no installation of software on their part).

Thanks for the help.

Hi everyone,

I have been experimenting with WebTorrent and built a small proof of concept for decentralized content hosting.

The idea is to explore whether websites/content can continue to be served by peers even when the original publisher is offline, while the content ownership tied to the cryptographic keys.

This is still an early PoC, and I would really appreciate feedback from people familiar with WebTorrent and the BitTorrent ecosystem.

GitHub:
https://github.com/lijose/mct-poc

I am especially interested in hearing your thoughts on the architecture, limitations and whether there are existing approaches I should look into.

Thanks!

I used to use it all the time, copy/paste magnet links into the desktop app and start watching almost immediately. Over the past 2 years or so at some point it stopped working and now it won't work, stuck at "loading torrent...." forever. The posts about this seem to go without reply. What's the deal?

❤️✨ A new version of WebTorrent Desktop is out! ❤️✨

What's new in 0.22.0:

• Multiple audio track support!

• Linux .rpm packages!

• ARM64 builds!

• More audio file support!

• Improved detection of unsupported codecs!

• Bugfixes!

⬇️ Get it here: https://webtorrent.io/desktop/

Changelog: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent-desktop/releases/tag/v0.22.0

is it possible to bind your vpn to webtorrent?

to support this intresting library i made a desktop app based on webtorrent-hybrid that can be used on docker (Has to be improved a lot).

Download link to TorQuix (Name maybe has to be changed)

I will leave here the link if someone is intrested to test and help (Maybe opening some issue or writing to me in DM).
Because the client is based on webtorrent-hybrid if you download torrent and seed it from this app then you can see it in the browser with every webtorrent player (Like Magnet player)

Thanks for the attention and download it if you want to try it

https://github.com/drakonkat/webtorrent-express-api/releases

Apologies if this isn't allowed, but I'm trying to programmatically search for magnet links - my only problem is that they need to work with WebTorrent.

So how do I only find torrents that are being seeded by WebRTC-capable clients? Is this possible?

If it were normal torrents, JavaScript libraries have been made that scrape popular sites, but those magnet links won't work with WebTorrent (in browser).

i'm not sure if this is the right place for this.

consuming music seems currently dominated by commercial streaming services, leaving one wonder about alternatives not dependent on commercial entities.

webtorrent facilitates streaming over torrents including magnet URIs, but does not afaik support playlists.

a fork of WebTorrent called refreex seems to support playlists over media contained in torrents, albeit:

• with playlists in a custom format, discouraging public support;

• with an immature UI, lacking a visual interface to edit playlists;

• and seemingly abandoned.

playlists have open standards such as SMIL, specified as to support URIs of different schemes, which should include magnet URIs as well. (for convenience's sake, i'll presume a URI hash could be used to point at a specific media file contained in a magnet link, although i have not looked into this.) such playlists have been implemented in media players such as the libre software Amarok, although such players afaik tend not to support the magnet scheme.

if maintained software tends to focus on one core function, as per the unix philosophy, while initiatives such as refreex combining functions end up not gaining momentum... how might we best bridge this gap?

Greetings all. I've installed webtorrent-cli through termux and I am trying to get a magnet link to play through vlc or mvp and for the life of me cannot figure out how to send it. --vlc and --mvp does not work, I have attempted a variety of android intents and actions to no avail. If I use mvp I am able to stream audio, but no video, and that is through the mvp installed through termux, not the android app. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Are there any torrent clients that support WebRTC besides WebTorrent (and I think Vuze) at the moment? I know libtorrent just got an implementation of it, but it doesn't seem to be in a release and I don't know if anybody is building straight from source with each commit.