Data Noise

One of my projects required a bittorrent integration. I've tried two available in Ruby options:

1. rubytorrent is a pure Ruby bittorrent client.
2. libtorrent-ruby is an inteface for libtorrent library.

Unfortunately, the first was not that stable and the latter I wasn't able to build at all. I am pretty sure that I was doing something wrong, but the time was pretty tight and I had to come up with a stable solution.

I remember there is a pretty decent open source application called Transmission. It didn't take me more than several hours to create a binding for Ruby. So here we go:

Transmission is a simple native bittorrent client for Ruby based on libtransmission library.

Installation

The only prerequisite for this library is that your Ruby must be compiled with pthread support enabled:

    $ ./configure --enable-pthread
    $ make
    $ sudo make install

Having done that, download gem and you should be able to install this gem without problems:

    $ sudo gem install transmission.gem

Synopsis

Assuming that you have progressbar gem installed:

    $ sudo gem install progressbar

You can use this script to download with a torrent file:

    require "rubygems"
    require "transmission"
    require "progressbar"

    # create a new session
    session = Transmission.new

    # open a torrent file
    torrent = session.open(ARGV[0])

    # set destination directory
    torrent.download_to File.expand_path('~/tmp')

    # starts a new native thread in background
    torrent.start

    progress = ProgressBar.new(" Downloading", 1.0)
    trap("INT") do
      torrent.stop
      progress.finish
      exit
    end

    # display progress bar
    until torrent.just_finished?
      progress.set(torrent.stat.progress)
      sleep 0.5
    end
    progress.finish

Known issues

1. I have tested it only on Linux and Mac OSX. It definitely is not going to work on Windows.
2. API is quite limited. For example, you can't create a new torrent file with it.

Enjoy.