aquatic/crates/http

aquatic_http: high-performance open HTTP BitTorrent tracker

High-performance open HTTP BitTorrent tracker for Linux 5.8 or later.

Features at a glance:

• Multithreaded design for handling large amounts of traffic
• All data is stored in-memory (no database needed)
• IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Supports forbidding/allowing info hashes
• Prometheus metrics
• Automated CI testing of full file transfers

Performance

More benchmark details are available here.

Usage

Compiling

• Install Rust with rustup (latest stable release is recommended)
• Install cmake with your package manager (e.g., apt-get install cmake)
• Clone this git repository and enter its root directory
• Build the application:

# Recommended: tell Rust to enable support for all SIMD extensions present on
# current CPU except for those relating to AVX-512. (If you run a processor
# that doesn't clock down when using AVX-512, you can enable those instructions
# too.)
. ./scripts/env-native-cpu-without-avx-512

cargo build --release -p aquatic_http

Configuring

Generate the configuration file:

./target/release/aquatic_http -p > "aquatic-http-config.toml"

Make necessary adjustments to the file. You will likely want to adjust address (listening address) under the network section.

aquatic_http only runs over TLS, so configuring certificate and private key files is required.

Running behind a reverse proxy is currently not supported due to the difficulties of determining the originating IP address without knowing the exact setup.

Running

Make sure locked memory limits are sufficient:

• If you're using a systemd service file, add LimitMEMLOCK=65536000 to it
• Otherwise, add the following lines to /etc/security/limits.conf, and then log out and back in:

*    hard    memlock    65536
*    soft    memlock    65536

Once done, start the application:

./target/release/aquatic_http -c "aquatic-http-config.toml"

If your server is pointed to by domain example.com and you configured the tracker to run on port 3000, people can now use it by adding the URL https://example.com:3000/announce to their torrent files or magnet links.

Load testing

A load test application is available. It supports generation and loading of configuration files in a similar manner to the tracker application.

After starting the tracker, run the load tester:

./scripts/run-load-test-http.sh

Details

Implements:

• BEP 003: HTTP BitTorrent protocol (more details). Exceptions:
  • Only runs over TLS
  • Doesn't track the number of torrent downloads (0 is always sent)
  • Only compact responses are supported
• BEP 023: Compact HTTP responses
• BEP 007: IPv6 support
• BEP 048: HTTP scrape support. Notes:
  • Doesn't allow full scrapes, i.e. of all registered info hashes

aquatic_http has not been tested as much as aquatic_udp, but likely works fine in production.

Copyright and license

Copyright (c) 2020-2023 Joakim Frostegård

Distributed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. Please refer to the LICENSE file in the repository root directory for details.