HOWTO: Install the latest version of rTorrent, Ubuntu

Be sure you are root or have sudo rights. At first we try to clean the system, if there’s any older version installed from repository. You can try this:

# sudo apt-get remove rtorrent libtorrent7

On newer systems, like my Ubuntu 9.04 you could try this:

# sudo apt-get remove rtorrent libtorrent11

After this we need to install some packet dependencies and compiling tools.

libTorrent’s README says:

libsigc++ 2.0 (deb: libsigc++-2.0-dev)
g++ >= 3.3

rTorrents README says:

libcurl >= 7.12.0
ncurses

So we try to install the following packets. Maybe they differ at your system version.

# sudo apt-get install build-essential libsigc++-2.0-dev pkg-config comerr-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libidn11-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5 libncurses5-dev

If you got some old packets, which are useless, you can clean them up using this command:

# apt-get autoremove

Go to your home directory or another directory you like.

# cd ~

Now we download the lastest stable release of libTorrent and rTorrent. You can find them here.

# wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/libtorrent-0.12.4.tar.gz && wget http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/rtorrent-0.8.4.tar.gz

Now we have to extract the files.

# tar -xvvzf libtorrent-0.12.4.tar.gz && tar -xvvzf rtorrent-0.8.4.tar.gz

Configure, Compile & Install:

# cd libtorrent-0.12.4
# ./configure && make && make install
# cd ../rtorrent-0.8.4
# ./configure && make && make install

If there are no errors, we got rTorrent successfully installed. At this point we need a configuration file, a session directory and a torrent directory.

We change to a normal user.

# su your-user-name

We change to his home directory.

# cd ~

Now we create a torrent directory.

# mkdir torrent

In this directory we create a session directory. I make it invisible because we don’t have to access it in the future.

# cd torrent
# mkdir .session

Now we have to create a configuration file. Change to your home directory.

# cd ~
# touch .rtorrent.rc

You can get a default configuration file here. Copy the lines into your configuration file and edit the following two:

directory = /home/your-user-name/torrent
session = /home/your-user-name/.session

Save the file. Now we are finished. You can start rtorrent using this command:

# rtorrent